fuse a whole dinner and reserve
all his appetite for the dessert, before he knew whether there was to be
any dessert or not. If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world,
we surely have it here. We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and
perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad,
we have heard the mermaids singing, and know that we shall never see dry
land any more. Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. If there is
a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let
us have a pipe before we go!

Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous preparation for old
age is only trouble thrown away. We fall on guard, and after all it is a
friend who comes to meet us. After the sun is down and the west faded,
the heavens begin to fill with shining stars. So, as we grow old, a sort
of equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted for the violent ups and
downs of passion and disgust; the same influence that restrains our
hopes quiets our apprehensions; if the pleasures are less intense, the
troubles are milder and more tolerable; and in a word, this period for
which we are asked to hoard up everything as for a time of famine, is,
in its own right, the richest, easiest, and happiest of life. Nay, by
managing its own work and following its own happy inspiration, youth is
doing the best it can to endow the leisure of age. A full, busy youth is
your only prelude to a self-contained and independent age; and the muff
inevitably develops into the bore. There are not many Doctor Johnsons,
to set forth upon their first romantic voyage at sixty-four. If we wish
to scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves' kitchen in the East End, to go
down in a diving-dress or up in a balloon, we must be about it while we
are still young. It will not do to delay until we are clogged with
prudence and limping with rheumatism, and people begin to ask us: "What
does Gravity out of bed?" Youth is the time to go flashing from one end
of the world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of
different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in
town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the
metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait
all day long in the theatre to applaud _Hernani_. There is some meaning
in the old theory about wild oats; and a man who has not had his
green-sickness and got done with it for good, is as little to