in
that case, you need no examples of any kind. You are your own example.

I read with keen interest, the other day, a feature article in one of
our great daily newspapers, giving incidents in the careers of fifteen
American millionaires who made their fortunes after they were fifty.
But all these had the luck of the never-say-die men. They were all of
the class that Emerson describes as having an excess of arterial
circulation.

Every failure to them was simply an access of information. They
regarded each loss as another piece of instruction in the game.
Fortune always gives the winnings to such as these at last. Fortune
loves a daring player; and while she may rebuff him for a while, it is
only to gild the refined gold of his ultimate achievings.

Another thing. Go you to church. Use clean linen. Wear good and
well-fitting clothing. Take care of your shoes. Look after all the
details of your personal grooming. In short, observe all the methods
which human experience has devised to keep men from degenerating.
There is an unalterable connection between the physical and mental and
moral.

The old saying that "cleanliness is next to godliness" has beneath it
all the philosophy of civilization.

It is an easy process that produces tramps. A few days' growth of
beard, the tolerance of certain personal habits of indolence, and your
tramp begins, vaguely, but none the less surely, to appear. This is
accompanied by a falling off in clear-cut thought, a blurring of the
moralities, and a cessation of definite and effective energy. This is
itself, of course, an interminable subject upon which several papers
might be written; but perhaps I have said enough to make apparent to
you its practical application.

The stages of degeneration are as easy as they are fatal, and since to
resist them requires courage, force, and alertness, it is only too
probable that the man past fifty, who feels that he has failed, is
beginning to submit to them. Do not do it. Resort to every possible
device to prevent it; for degeneration, in itself, is failure; more,
it is death. It is exactly the same force which rots out the heart of
the oak, manifesting itself in human character.

Your problem is not to give way to your weaknesses. That is the
problem of all of us. "I see two men looking from your eyes," said the
Norse seeress, "a young man and an old man. Do not let the old man in
you conquer the young man in you." Very well! Barring the loss