An old man who was just one hundred and three years of age,
recently died in Chester, England. Not long before his death
he tried to get out of bed, and they said to him: “Father,
where do you want to go? What do you want to do?” He answered,
“Father is calling me to breakfast.” He repeated it two or three
times--“Father is calling me to breakfast.” The old man had
become a child again. He was in his little trundle-bed again
hearing his father’s voice up the stairway calling him to come
to breakfast.
So when we have traveled around the circle of life, we get into the
childhood of our old age, and hear the voices of the friends of our
youth, which is one of the evidences of the belief that we shall hear
those voices again. We would not thus recall them nor remember them if
we were not to hear them again.
(1788)