iderable regard for him. Now, if the world of readers hates
anything it sees in print, it is apology. If what one has to say is
worth saying, he need not beg pardon fur saying it. If it is not worth
saying I will not finish the sentence. But it is so hard to resist the
temptation, notwithstanding that the terrible line beginning "Superfluous
lags the veteran" is always repeating itself in his dull ear!

What kind of audience or reading parish is a man who secured his
constituency in middle life, or before that period, to expect when he has
reached the age of threescore and twenty? His coevals have dropped away
by scores and tens, and he sees only a few units scattered about here and
there, like the few beads above the water after a ship has gone to
pieces. Does he write and publish for those of his own time of life? He
need not print a large edition. Does he hope to secure a hearing from
those who have come into the reading world since his coevals? They have
found fresher fields and greener pastures. Their interests are in the
out-door, active world. Some of them are circumnavigating the planet
while he is hitching his rocking chair about his hearth-rug. Some are
gazing upon the pyramids while he is staring at his andirons. Some are
settling the tariff and fixing the laws of suffrage and taxation while he
is dozing over the weather bulletin, and going to sleep over the
obituaries in his morning or evening paper.

Nature is wiser than we give her credit for being; never wiser than in
her dealings with the old. She has no idea of mortifying them by sudden
and wholly unexpected failure of the chief servants of consciousness.
The sight, for instance, begins to lose something of its perfection long
before its deficiency calls the owner's special attention to it. Very
probably, the first hint we have of the change is that a friend makes the
pleasing remark that we are "playing the trombone," as he calls it; that
is, moving a book we are holding backward and forward, to get the right
focal distance. Or it may be we find fault with the lamp or the
gas-burner for not giving so much light as it used to. At last,
somewhere between forty and fifty, we begin to dangle a jaunty pair of
eye-glasses, half plaything and half necessity. In due time a pair of
sober, business-like spectacles bestrides the nose. Old age leaps upon
it as his saddle, and rides triumphant, unchallenged, until the darkness
comes which no glasses can penetrate.