h shoe, wadded pelisse, wig and spectacles,
and padded chair of Age. Nature lends herself to these illusions, and adds
dim sight, deafness, cracked voice, snowy hair, short memory, and sleep.
These also are masks, and all is not Age that wears them. Whilst we yet
call ourselves young, and all our mates are yet youths and boyish, one
good fellow in the set prematurely sports a gray or a bald head, which
does not impose on us who know how innocent of sanctity or of Platonism he
is, but does not less deceive his juniors and the public, who presently
distinguish him with a most amusing respect: and this lets us into the
secret, that the venerable forms that so awed our childhood were just such
impostors. Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young
shoulders, and then a young heart beating under fourscore winters.

For if the essence of age is not present, these signs, whether of Art or
Nature, are counterfeit and ridiculous: and the essence of age is
intellect. Wherever that appears, we call it old. If we look into the eyes
of the youngest person, we sometimes discover that here is one who knows
already what you would go about with much pains to teach him; there is
that in him which is the ancestor of all around him: which fact the Indian
Vedas express, when they say, "He that can discriminate is the father of
his father." And in our old British legends of Arthur and the Round-Table,
his friend and counsellor, Merlin the Wise, is a babe found exposed in a
basket by the river-side, and, though an infant of only a few days, he
speaks to those who discover him, tells his name and history, and
presently foretells the fate of the by-standers. Wherever there is power,
there is age. Don't be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe
is a thousand years old.

Time is, indeed, the theatre and seat of illusion. Nothing is so ductile
and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to
an hour. Saadi found in a mosque at Damascus an old Persian of a hundred
and fifty years who was dying, and was saying to himself, "I said, coming
into the world by birth, 'I will enjoy myself for a few moments.' Alas! at
the variegated table of life I partook of a few mouthfuls, and the Fates
said, '_Enough!_'" That which does not decay is so central and controlling
in us, that, as long as one is alone by himself, he is not sensible of the
inroads of time, which always begin at the surface-edges. If, on a