inciples, was tossed aside
by a squall on the universe of things, and died. It is now thirty-nine
years since he summed up his life's wisdom in the words: "Tell my
children to obey the laws and support the Constitution." That was about
the summation of Socrates' wisdom, this matter of the laws, as he lay in
prison opposite the Acropolis. He refused to walk forth free, except by
the law. If I live until June the eighteenth I shall be eighty-five
years of age. On the score of age I should feel much wiser than Douglas
who died at forty-eight and Socrates who died at sixty. I feel that I am
a good deal like Shakespeare. I have very little respect for the
laws--at least for the written laws. I am not so sure about the higher
law, if I am left to determine it. But in truth I am a good deal in
doubt as to what is right, and what is wrong, what good and what evil.
And I never know what the law is. I have wondered about it all my life.
I have thought at times I knew, but I have been for the most part
betrayed and fooled.

And why not now? Miss Sharpe, delicate, spiritual, active of mind, lives
at the boarding house where I do. She thinks I am a fine old gentleman.
She likes my society. I am to her taste interesting because I am
experienced. I am richer intellectually than any man could be at an
earlier age. She reads to me, often reads to me:

"Grow old along with me,
The best is yet to be,
The last of life for which the first was made."

How glorious is old age! She comforts me, makes me contented with my
state at times; she makes me forget how I feel when I rise in the
morning, stiff, bewildered, sometimes wondering where I am. She helps me
to establish my mind when it thinks of too many things at once, and
cannot choose for paltering and fumbling. I walk with a cane; but legs
are nothing. The soul is the prize, the flower. My food does not digest
itself well; my heart flutters and stumbles; my eyes refuse to work even
with the best of glasses. The doctor says I have an old man's arteries.
I know when my memory falters that it is due to the brain which has
shrunk, and to the incrusted arteries which do not carry enough blood
cells to the brain to give me memory. Still the best is yet to be, and
this is now it. I think the law of old age will get me eventually just
as the law of the new era caught Douglas and destroyed him.

It is thirty years now since the great Chicago fire swept my fortune
away. I saved one lot out of t