I had cleared
the eight-barred gate, which few come in sight of, and fewer, far fewer,
go over, a year before. I was a trespasser on the domain belonging to
another generation. The children of my coevals were fast getting gray
and bald, and their children beginning to look upon the world as
belonging to them, and not to their sires and grandsires. After that
leap over the tall barrier, it looks like a kind of impropriety to keep
on as if one were still of a reasonable age. Sometimes it seems to me
almost of the nature of a misdemeanor to be wandering about in the
preserve which the fleshless gamekeeper guards so jealously. But, on the
other hand, I remember that men of science have maintained that the
natural life of man is nearer fivescore than threescore years and ten. I
always think of a familiar experience which I bring from the French
cafes, well known to me in my early manhood. One of the illustrated
papers of my Parisian days tells it pleasantly enough.

A guest of the establishment is sitting at his little table. He has just
had his coffee, and the waiter is serving him with his petit verre. Most
of my readers know very well what a petit verre is, but there may be here
and there a virtuous abstainer from alcoholic fluids, living among the
bayberries and the sweet ferns, who is not aware that the words, as
commonly used, signify a small glass--a very small glass--of spirit,
commonly brandy, taken as a chasse-cafe, or coffee-chaser. This drinking
of brandy, "neat," I may remark by the way, is not quite so bad as it
looks. Whiskey or rum taken unmixed from a tumbler is a knock-down blow
to temperance, but the little thimbleful of brandy, or Chartreuse, or
Maraschino, is only, as it were, tweaking the nose of teetotalism.

Well,--to go back behind our brackets,--the guest is calling to the
waiter, "Garcon! et le bain de pieds!" Waiter! and the foot-bath!--The
little glass stands in a small tin saucer or shallow dish, and the custom
is to more than fill the glass, so that some extra brandy rung over into
this tin saucer or cup-plate, to the manifest gain of the consumer.

Life is a petit verre of a very peculiar kind of spirit. At seventy
years it used to be said that the little glass was full. We should be
more apt to put it at eighty in our day, while Gladstone and Tennyson and
our own Whittier are breathing, moving, thinking, writing, speaking, in
the green preserve belonging to their children and grandchildren,