of being, I have
the evidence of my own senses (and I am seldom mistaken in a person's
age), of his own family, and his own word; and it is incredible that so
old a person, and one so apparently near the grave, would deceive about
his age.

The testimony of the very aged is always to be received without
question, as Alexander Hamilton once learned. He was trying a land-title
with Aaron Burr, and two of the witnesses upon whom Burr relied were
venerable Dutchmen, who had, in their youth, carried the surveying
chains over the land in dispute, and who were now aged respectively one
hundred and four years and one hundred and six years. Hamilton gently
attempted to undervalue their testimony, but he was instantly put down
by the Dutch justice, who suggested that Mr. Hamilton could not be aware
of the age of the witnesses.

My old man (the expression seems familiar and inelegant) had indeed an
exaggerated idea of his own age, and sometimes said that he supposed he
was going on four hundred, which was true enough, in fact; but for the
exact date, he referred to his youngest son,--a frisky and humorsome
lad of eighty years, who had received us at the gate, and whom we had at
first mistaken for the veteran, his father. But when we beheld the old
man, we saw the difference between age and age. The latter had settled
into a grizzliness and grimness which belong to a very aged and stunted
but sturdy oak-tree, upon the bark of which the gray moss is thick and
heavy. The old man appeared hale enough, he could walk about, his sight
and hearing were not seriously impaired, he ate with relish, and his
teeth were so sound that he would not need a dentist for at least
another century; but the moss was growing on him. His boy of eighty
seemed a green sapling beside him.

He remembered absolutely nothing that had taken place within thirty
years, but otherwise his mind was perhaps as good as it ever was, for he
must always have been an ignoramus, and would never know anything if
he lived to be as old as he said he was going on to be. Why he was
interested in the rebellion of 1745 I could not discover, for he of
course did not go over to Scotland to carry a pike in it, and he only
remembered to have heard it talked about as a great event in the Irish
market-town near which he lived, and to which he had ridden when a boy.
And he knew much more about the horse that drew him, and the cart in
which he rode, than he did about the rebellion of t