mpany should let us hear what he had to say about it. I
received a polite note, requesting me to discourse about old age,
inasmuch as I was particularly well qualified by my experience to write
in an authoritative way concerning it. The fact is that I,--for it is
myself who am speaking,--have recently arrived at the age of threescore
years and twenty,--fourscore years we may otherwise call it. In the
arrangement of our table, I am Teacup Number One, and I may as well say
that I am often spoken of as The Dictator. There is nothing invidious in
this, as I am the oldest of the company, and no claim is less likely to
excite jealousy than that of priority of birth.

I received congratulations on reaching my eightieth birthday, not only
from our circle of Teacups, but from friends, near and distant, in large
numbers. I tried to acknowledge these kindly missives with the aid of a
most intelligent secretary; but I fear that there were gifts not thanked
for, and tokens of good-will not recognized. Let any neglected
correspondent be assured that it was not intentionally that he or she was
slighted. I was grateful for every such mark of esteem; even for the
telegram from an unknown friend in a distant land, for which I cheerfully
paid the considerable charge which the sender doubtless knew it would
give me pleasure to disburse for such an expression of friendly feeling.

I will not detain the reader any longer from the essay I have promised.

This is the paper read to The Teacups.

It is in A Song of Moses that we find the words, made very familiar to us
by the Episcopal Burial Service, which place the natural limit on life at
threescore years and ten, with an extra ten years for some of a stronger
constitution than the average. Yet we are told that Moses himself lived
to be a hundred and twenty years old, and that his eye was not dim nor
his natural strength abated. This is hard to accept literally, but we
need not doubt that he was very old, and in remarkably good condition for
a man of his age. Among his followers was a stout old captain, Caleb,
the son of Jephunneh. This ancient warrior speaks of himself in these
brave terms: "Lo, I am this day fourscore and five years old. As yet, I
am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me; as my
strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war, both to go out
and to come in." It is not likely that anybody believed his brag about
his being as good a man for active