Indirect Speech: Reporting the sentence "I said to him, 'it is a thing of the past'"

When reporting someone's words or speech in indirect speech, we need to make certain changes to the original sentence to fit it into the new context. The following steps can be followed to convert the given sentence into indirect speech:

1. Remove quotation marks and change the tense:
- The direct speech sentence is: "It is a thing of the past."
- Since the reporting verb "said" is in the past tense, we need to change the present tense verb "is" to the past tense verb "was".
- The sentence in indirect speech becomes: I told him that it was a thing of the past.

2. Remove the first person pronoun:
- In indirect speech, the first person pronoun "I" needs to be changed to the corresponding pronoun of the reported speech.
- The revised sentence becomes: He told him that it was a thing of the past.

Final Sentence:
He told him that it was a thing of the past.

In this case, the original sentence is transformed into indirect speech by changing the tense of the verb and replacing the first person pronoun with the appropriate pronoun. The sentence still conveys the same meaning while adhering to the rules of indirect speech.