hty-eighth year. I could notice scarcely a change in his appearance,
walk, voice, and spirit. We talked at length upon the various,
so-called, periods of life. He told me that about the only difference
that he noticed in himself as compared with his middle life was that now
when he goes out to work in his garden, and among his trees, bushes, and
vines--and he has had many for many years--he finds that he is quite
ready to quit and to come in at the end of about two hours, and
sometimes a little sooner, when formerly he could work regularly without
fatigue for the entire half day. In other words, he has not the same
degree of endurance that he once had.

Among others, there comes to mind in this connection another who is a
little under seventy. It chances to be a woman. She is bent and decrepit
and growing more so by very fixed stages each twelvemonth. I have known
her for over a dozen years. At the time when I first knew her she was
scarcely fifty-eight, she was already bent and walked with an
uncertain, almost faltering tread. The dominant note of her personality
was then as now, but more so now, fear for the present, fear for the
future, a dwelling continually on her ills, her misfortunes, her
symptoms, her approaching and increasing helplessness.

Such cases I have observed again and again; so have all who are at all
interested in life and in its forces and its problems. What is the cause
of this almost world-wide difference in these two lives? In this case it
is as clear as day--the mental characteristics and the mental habits of
each.

In the first case, here was one who early got a little philosophy into
his life and then more as the years passed. He early realised that in
himself his good or his ill fortune lay; that the mental attitude we
take toward anything determines to a great extent our power in
connection with it, as well as its effects upon us. He grew to love his
work and he did it daily, but never under high pressure. He was
therefore benefited by it. His face was always to the future, even as it
is today. This he made one of the fundamental rules of his life. He was
helped in this, he told me in substance, by an early faith which with
the passing of the years has ripened with him into a demonstrable
conviction--that there is a Spirit of Infinite Life back of all,
working in love in and through the lives of all, and that in the degree
that we realise it as the one Supreme Source of our lives, and when