ved a polite note, requesting me to discourse
about old age, inasmuch as I was particularly well qualified by my
experience to write in an authoritative way concerning it. The fact is
that I,--for it is myself who am speaking,--have recently arrived at the
age of threescore years and twenty,--fourscore years we may otherwise
call it. In the arrangement of our table, I am Teacup Number One, and
I may as well say that I am often spoken of as The Dictator. There is
nothing invidious in this, as I am the oldest of the company, and no
claim is less likely to excite jealousy than that of priority of birth.

I received congratulations on reaching my eightieth birthday, not only
from our circle of Teacups, but from friends, near and distant, in large
numbers. I tried to acknowledge these kindly missives with the aid of a
most intelligent secretary; but I fear that there were gifts not
thanked for, and tokens of good-will not recognized. Let any neglected
correspondent be assured that it was not intentionally that he or she
was slighted. I was grateful for every such mark of esteem; even for
the telegram from an unknown friend in a distant land, for which I
cheerfully paid the considerable charge which the sender doubtless knew
it would give me pleasure to disburse for such an expression of friendly
feeling.

I will not detain the reader any longer from the essay I have promised.

This is the paper read to The Teacups.

It is in A Song of Moses that we find the words, made very familiar to
us by the Episcopal Burial Service, which place the natural limit on
life at threescore years and ten, with an extra ten years for some of
a stronger constitution than the average. Yet we are told that Moses
himself lived to be a hundred and twenty years old, and that his eye
was not dim nor his natural strength abated. This is hard to accept
literally, but we need not doubt that he was very old, and in remarkably
good condition for a man of his age. Among his followers was a stout
old captain, Caleb, the son of Jephunneh. This ancient warrior speaks
of himself in these brave terms: "Lo, I am this day fourscore and five
years old. As yet, I am as strong this day as I was in the day that
Moses sent me; as my strength was then, even so is my strength now,
for war, both to go out and to come in." It is not likely that anybody
believed his brag about his being as good a man for active service at
eighty-five as he was at forty, when Moses sent h