Life on the Mississippi, Part 9 by Mark Twain

DURING my three days' stay in the town, I woke up every morning with the impression that I was a boy -- for in my dreams the faces were all young again, and looked as they had looked in the old times -- but I went to bed a hundred years old, every night -- for meantime I had been seeing those faces as they are now.

Of course I suffered some surprises, along at first, before I had become adjusted to the changed state of things. I met young ladies who did not seem to have changed at all; but they turned out to be the daughters of the young ladies I had in mind -- sometimes their grand-daughters. When you are told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there is nothing surprising about it; but if, on the contrary, she is a person whom you knew as a little girl, it seems impossible. You say to yourself, 'How can a little girl be a grandmother. ' It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter.