Tommy McGuffy was growing old. The skin of his attenuated face was so shrunk and so stretched from wrinkle to wrinkle that it seemed narrowly to escape breaking. About the pointed chin and the cheekbones it had the colour of faded brick.

Old Tommy had become so thin that he dared not venture to the top of the hill above his native village of Rearward on a windy day.

His knees bent comically when he walked.

For some years the villagers had been counting the nephews and nieces to whom the savings of the old retired dealer in dry-goods would eventually descend.

Ten thousand dollars and a house and lot constituted a heritage worth anticipating in Rearward.

The innocent old man was not upon terms of intimacy with his prospective heirs. Having remained unmarried, his only close associates were two who had been his companions in that remote period which had been his boyhood. One of these, Jerry Hurley, was a childless widower, a very estimable and highly respected man who owned two farms. The other, like himself a bachelor, was Billy Skidmore, the sexton of the church, and, therefore, the regulator of the town clock upon the steeple.

There came a great shock to Tommy one day. As old Mrs. Sparks said, Jerry Hurley, “all sudden-like, just took a notion and died.”

The wealth and standing of Jerry Hurley insured him an imposing funeral. They laid his body beside that which had once been his wife in Rearward cemetery. His heirs possessed his farm, and time went on—slowly as it always does at Rearward. Tommy went frequently to Hurley's grave and wondered when his heirs would erect a monument to his memory. It is necessary that your grave be marked with a monument if you would stand high in that still society that holds eternal assembly beneath the pines and willows, where only the breezes speak, and they in subdued voices.

Years passed, and the grave of Tommy's old friend, Jerry, remained unmarked. Jerry's relatives had postponed the duty so long that they had grown callous to public opinion. Besides, they had other purposes to which to apply Jerry's money. It was easy enough to avoid reproach; they had only to refrain from visiting the graveyard.

“Jerry never deserved such treatment,” Tommy would say to Billy the sexton, as the two met to talk it over every sunny afternoon.

“It's an outrage, that's what it is!” Billy would reply, for the hundredth time.

It was, in their eyes, an omission almost equal to that of baptism or that of the funeral service.

One day, as Tommy was aiding himself along the main street of Rearward by means of a hickory stick, a frightful thought came to him. He turned cold.

What if his own heirs should neglect to mark his own grave?

“I'll hurry home at once, and put the money for it in a stocking foot,” thought Tommy, and his knees bent more than usually as he accelerated his pace.

But as he tied a knot in the stocking, came the fear that even this money might be misapplied; even his will might be ignored, through repeated postponement and the law's indifference.

Who, save old Billy Skidmore, would care whether old Tommy McGuffy's last resting-place were designated or not? Once let the worms begin operations upon this antique morsel, what would it matter to Rearward folks where the banquet was taking place?

Tommy now underwent a second attack of horror, from which he came victorious, a gleeful smile momentarily lifting the dimness from his excessively lachrymal eyes.

“I'll fix 'em,” he said to himself. “I'll go to-day to Ricketts, the marble-cutter, and order my own tombstone.”

Three months thereafter, Ricketts, the marble-cutter, untied the knot in the stocking that had been Billy's and deposited the contents in the local savings-bank.

In the cemetery stood a monument very lofty and elaborate. Around it was an iron fence. Within the enclosure there was no grave as yet.

“Here,” said the monument, in deep-cut-letters, but bad English, “lies all that remains of Thomas McGuffy, born in Rearward, November 11, 1820; died——. Gone whither the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.”

This supplementary information was framed in the words of Tommy's favourite passage in his favourite hymn. His liking for this was mainly on account of its tune.

He had left the date of his death to be inserted by the marble cutter after its occurrence.

Rearward folks were amused at sight of the monument, and they ascribed the placing of it there to the eccentricity of a taciturn old man.

Tommy seemed to derive much pleasure from visiting his tombstone on mild days. He spent many hours contemplating it. He would enter the iron enclosure, lock the gate after him, and sit upon the ground that was intended some day to cover his body.

He was a familiar sight to people riding or walking past the graveyard,—this thin old man leaning upon his cane, contentedly pondering over the inscription on his own tombstone.

He undoubtedly found much innocent pleasure in it.

One afternoon, as he was so engaged, he was assailed by a new apprehension.

Suppose that Ricketts, the marble-cutter, should fail to inscribe the date of his death in the space left vacant for it!

There was almost no likelihood of such an omission, but there was at least a possibility of it.

He glanced across the cemetery to Jerry Hurley's unmarked mound, and shuddered.

Then he thought laboriously.

When he left the cemetery in such time as to avoid a delay of his evening meal and a consequent outburst of anger on the part of his old housekeeper, he had taken a resolution.

“Threescore years and ten, says the Bible,” he muttered to himself as he walked homeward. “The scriptural lifetime'll do for me.”

A week thereafter old Tommy gazed proudly upon the finished inscription.

“Died November 11, 1890,” was the newest bit of biography there engraved.

“But it's two years and more till November 11, 1890,” said a voice at his side.

Tommy merely cast an indifferent look upon the speaker and walked off without a word.

The whole village now thought that Tommy had become a monomaniac upon the subject of his tombstone. Perhaps he had. No one has been able to learn from his friend, Billy Skidmore, what thoughts he may have communicated to the latter upon the matter.

Tommy now lived for no other apparent purpose than to visit his tombstone daily. He no longer confined his walks thither to the pleasant days. He went in weather most perilous to so old and frail a man.

One of his prospective heirs took sufficient interest in him to advise more care of his health.

“I can easily keep alive till the time comes,” returned the antique; “there's only a year left.”

Rapidly his hold upon life relaxed. A week before November 11, 1890, he went to bed and stayed there. People began to speculate as to whether his unique prediction—or I should say, his decree—would be fulfilled to the very day.

Upon the fifth day of his illness Death threatened to come before the time that had been set for receiving him.

“Isn't this the tenth?” the old man mumbled.

“No,” said his housekeeper, who with one of his nieces, the doctor, and Billy Skidmore, attended the ill man, “it's only the 9th.”

“Then I must fight for two days more; the tombstone must not lie.”

And he rallied so well that it seemed as if the tombstone would lie, nevertheless, for Tommy was still alive at eleven-thirty on the night of November 11. Moreover he had been in his senses when last awake, and there was every likelihood that he would look at the clock whenever his eyes should next open.

“He can't live till morning, that's sure,” said the doctor.

“But, good Lord! you don't mean to say that he'll hold out till after twelve o'clock,” said Billy Skidmore, whose anxiety only had sustained him in his grief at the approaching dissolution of his friend.

“Quite probably,” replied the doctor.

“Good heavens! Tommy won't rest easy in his grave if he don't die on the 11th. The monument will be wrong.”

“Oh, that won't matter,” said the niece.

Billy looked at her in amazement. Was his old friend's sacred wish to miscarry thus?

“Yes, 'twill matter,” he said, in a loud whisper. “And if time won't wait for Tommy of its own accord, we'll make it. When did he last see the clock?”

“Half-past nine,” said the housekeeper.

“Then we'll turn it back to ten,” said Skidmore, acting as he spoke.

“But he may hear the town clock strike.”

Billy said never a word, but plunged into his overcoat, threw on his hat, and hurried on into the cold night.

“Ten minutes to midnight,” he said, as he looked up at the town clock upon the church steeple. “Can I skin up them ladders in time?”

Tommy awoke once before the last slumber. Billy was by his bedside, as were the doctor, the housekeeper, and the niece. The old man's eyes sought the clock.

“Eleven,” he murmured. Then he was silent, for the town clock had begun to strike. He counted the strokes—eleven. Then he smiled and tried to speak again.

“Almost—live out—birthday—seventy—tombstone—all right.”

He closed his eyes, and, inasmuch as the town clock furnishes the official time for Rearward, the published report of Tommy McGuffy's going records that he passed at twenty-five minutes after eleven P.M., November 11, 1890.

Very few people know that time turned back one hour and a half in order that the reputation of Tommy McGuffy's tombstone for veracity might be spotless in the eyes of future generations.

Billy Skidmore, the sexton, arranged to have Rearward time ready for the sun when it rose upon the following morning.