the years hurried onward, treading in their haste on one another's heels. and now they began to bring white hairs, and scatter them over the head of ernest; they made reverend wrinkles across his forehead, and furrows in his cheeks. he was an aged man. but not in vain had he grown old: more than the white hairs on his head were the sage thoughts in his mind; his wrinkles and furrows were inscriptions that time had graved, and in which he had written legends of wisdom that had been tested by the tenor of a life. and ernest had ceased to be obscure.