me and fortune, and have not been willing to pay the price
in self-denial that all worthy success demands. We find our position
in life according to the specific gravity of our moral and
intellectual natures.

NOTES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OLD AGE[7]

The physiology of old age is well understood--general sluggishness of
all the functions, stiffness of the joints, more or less so-called
rheumatism, loss of strength, wasting tissues, broken sleep, failing
hearing and eyesight, capricious appetite, and so on. But the
psychology of old age is not so easily described. The old man reasons
well, the judgment is clear, the mind active, the conscience alert,
the interest in life unabated. It is the memory that plays the old
man tricks. His mind is a storehouse of facts and incidents and
experiences, but they do not hold together as they used to; their
relations are broken and very uncertain. He remembers the name of a
person, but perhaps cannot recall the face or presence; or he
remembers the voice and presence, but without the name or face. He may
go back to his school-days and try to restore the faded canvas of
those distant days. It is like resurrecting the dead; he exhumes them
from their graves: There was G----; how distinctly he recalls the name
and some incident in his school life, and that is all. There was
B----, a name only. There was R----, and the memory of the career he
had marked out for himself and his untimely death through a steamboat
accident; but of his looks, his voice--not a vestige! It is a memory
full of holes, like a net with many of the meshes broken. He recalls
his early teachers, some of them stand out vividly--voice, look,
manner--all complete. Others are only names associated with certain
incidents in school.

[Footnote 7: These fragments, which Mr. Burroughs intended to expand
into an article, were among the very last things he wrote.--C. B.]

Names and places with which one has been perfectly familiar all his
life suddenly, for a few moments, mean nothing. It is as if the belt
slipped, and the wheel did not go round. Then the next moment, away it
goes again! Or, shall we call it a kind of mental anaesthesia, or
mental paralysis? Thus, the other day I was reading something about
Georgetown, South America. I repeated the name over to myself a few
times. "Have I not known such a place some time in my life? Where is
it? Georgetown? Georgetown?" The name seemed like a dream. Then I
thought of Washingt