on, the Capital, and the city above it, but had to
ask a friend if the name was Georgetown. Then suddenly, as if some
chemical had been rubbed on a bit of invisible writing, out it came!
Of course it was Georgetown. How could I have been in doubt about it?
(I had lived in Washington for ten years.)

So we say, old age may reason well, but old age does not remember
well. This is a commonplace. It seems as if memory were the most
uncertain of all our faculties.

Power of attention fails, which we so often mistake for deafness in
the old. It is the mind that is blunted and not the ear. Hence we
octogenarians so often ask for your question over again. We do not
grasp it the first time. We do not want you to speak louder, we only
need to focus upon you a little more completely.

Of course both sight and hearing are a little blunted in old age. But
for myself I see as well as ever I did, except that I have to use
spectacles in reading; but nowadays the younger observers hear the
finer sounds in nature that sometimes escape me.

Some men mellow with age, others harden, but the man who does not in
some way ripen is in a bad way. Youth makes up in sap and push what it
lacks in repose.

To grow old gracefully is the trick.

To me one of the worst things about old age is that one has outlived
all his old friends. The Past becomes a cemetery.

"As men grow old," said Rochefoucauld, "they grow more foolish and
more wise"--wise in counsel, but foolish in conduct. "There is no fool
like an old fool," said Tennyson, but it is equally true that there is
no fool like the young fool. If you want calm and ripe wisdom, go to
middle age.

As an octogenarian, I have found it interesting to collate many wise
sayings of many wise men on youth and age.[8]

[Footnote 8: Here followed several pages of quotations from the
ancients and moderns.--C. B.]

Cicero found that age increased the pleasure of conversation. It is
certainly true that in age we do find our tongues, if we have any.
They are unloosed, and when the young or the middle-aged sit silent,
the octogenarian is a fountain of conversation. In age one set of
pleasures is gone and another takes its place.

Emerson published his essay on "Old Age" while he was yet in the
middle sixties, and I recall that in the "Emerson-Carlyle
Correspondence" both men began to complain of being old before they
were sixty. Scott was old before his time, and Macaulay too. Scott
died at sixty-on