I am a man past middle age.

I shall never marry now, and shall but drift into a time of doing some little, I hope, toward making things easier for some other men and some women, and then--into a crematory.

I have a fancy that my body, this machine of flesh and muscle in which I live, should not be boxed and buried in seeping earth to become a foul thing.

That was an idea I learned from this firm friend of mine.

I want it burned, and all of it, save the little urn full of white ashes which some one may care for, to go out and mingle with the pure air, and there to be one of earth's good things, and to be breathed in again and make part of the life of the maple leaf, or the young girl going to school in the morning, or the old-fashioned pinks in the front yard of the old-fashioned people, or the red roses in the florist's hot-houses.