Bits of Gossip

IT always has seemed to me that each human being, before going out into the silence, should leave behind him, not the story of his own life, but of the time in which he lived, - as he saw it, - its creed, its purpose, its queer habits, and the work which it did or left undone in the world. Taken singly, these accounts might be weak and trivial, but together, they would make history live and breathe. Think what flesh and color the diaries of an English tailor and an Italian vagabond have given to their times! Some such vague consideration as this has made me collect these scattered remembrances of my own generation, and of some of the men and women in it whom I have known. I have, of course, only spoken of the dead, whose work is done.