The Autobiography of Methuselah | Page 7

Company, running an hourly service of Pterodactyls and
Creosauruses between the most populous points of the country. This
naturally made of Uncle Zib a nearer approach to a Captain of Finance
than anything else known to our time, and inasmuch as he had never
married, and was without an heir, my father thought he would
appreciate the compliment of having his first-born named for him. But
Uncle Zib's moral character was of such a nature that his name seemed
to my mother as hardly a fit association for an infant of my tender years.
He was known to be addicted to pinochle to a degree that had caused
no end of gossip at the Ararat Woman's Club, and before he had
reached the age of three hundred he had five times been successfully
sued in the courts for breach of promise. Indeed, if Uncle Zib had had
fewer material resources he would long since have been ostracised by
the best people of our section, and even as it was the few people in our
neighborhood to whom he had not lent money regarded his social
pretensions with some coolness. The fact that he had given Enochsville
a public library, and had filled its shelves with several tons of the best
reading that the Egyptian writers of the day provided, was regarded as a
partial atonement for some of his indiscretions, and the endowment of a
large stone-quarry at Ararat where children were taught to read and
write, helped materially in his rehabilitation, but on the whole Uncle

Zib was looked upon askance by the majority. On the other hand Uncle
Azag, a strong, pious man, who owed money to everybody in town,
was the one after whom my mother wished me to be named, a
proposition which my father resisted to the uttermost expense of his
powers.
"What's the use?" I heard him ask, warmly. "He'll get his name on
plenty of I. O. U.'s on his own account before he leaves this glad little
earth, without our giving him an autograph that is already on enough
over-due paper to decorate every flat in Uncle Zib's model tenements."
The disputation continued with some acrimony for a week, until finally
my father put his foot down.
"I'm tired of referring to him as IT," he blurted out one night. "We'll
compromise, and name him after me and thee. He shall be called Me
for me, and Thou for thee, Selah!"
And so it was that from that day forth I was known as Methouselah,
since corrupted into Methuselah.
CHAPTER II
EARLY INFLUENCES
Boys remained boys in those old days very much longer than they do
now. The smartness of children like my grandsons, Shem, Ham and
Japhet, for instance, who at the age of two hundred and fifty arrogate to
themselves all the knowledge of the universe, was comparatively
unknown when I was a child. To begin with we were of a different
breed from the boys of to-day, and life itself was more simple. We were
surrounded with none of those luxuries which are characteristic of
modern life, and we were in no haste to grow old by taking short cuts
across the fields of time. We were content to remain youthful, and even
childish, taking on ourselves none of the superiorities of age until we
had attained to the years which are presumed to go with discretion. We
did not think either arrogantly or otherwise that we knew more by
intuition than our parents had been able to learn from experience, and,

with a few possible exceptions, we none of us assumed that position of
high authority in the family which is, I regret to say, generally assumed
by the sons and daughters of the present. For myself, I was quite
willing to admit, even on the day of my birth, that my father, in spite of
certain obvious limitations, knew more than I; and that my mother in
spite of the fact that she was a woman, was possessed, in a minor
degree perhaps, but still indubitably possessed, of certain of the
elementary qualities at least of human intelligence. As I recall my
attitude towards my elders in those days, the only person whose
pretensions to superior attainments along lines of universal knowledge
I was at all inclined to resent, was my maiden aunt, Jerusha, my father's
sister, who, having attained to the kittenish age of 623 years, unmarried,
and having consequently had no children, knew more about men and
their ways, and how to bring up children scientifically than anybody at
that time known to civilized society. Indeed I have always thought that
it was the general recognition of the fact that Aunt Jerusha knew just a
little more than there was to know that had brought about that