me may find it a consolation to reflect
on the probable miseries they escape in not being doomed to an undying
earthly existence.

There are strange diversities in the way in which different old persons
look upon their prospects. A millionaire whom I well remember confessed
that he should like to live long enough to learn how much a certain
fellow-citizen, a multimillionaire, was worth. One of the three
nonagenarians before referred to expressed himself as having a great
curiosity about the new sphere of existence to which he was looking
forward.

The feeling must of necessity come to many aged persons that they have
outlived their usefulness; that they are no longer wanted, but rather in
the way, drags on the wheels rather than helping them forward. But let
them remember the often-quoted line of Milton,

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

This is peculiarly true of them. They are helping others without always
being aware of it. They are the shields, the breakwaters, of those who
come after them. Every decade is a defence of the one next behind it. At
thirty the youth has sobered into manhood, but the strong men of forty
rise in almost unbroken rank between him and the approaches of old age
as they show in the men of fifty. At forty he looks with a sense of
security at the strong men of fifty, and sees behind them the row of
sturdy sexagenarians. When fifty is reached, somehow sixty does not look
so old as it once used to, and seventy is still afar off. After sixty
the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning
that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something
personal about it. But if one lives to seventy he soon gets used to
the text with the threescore years and ten in it, and begins to count
himself among those who by reason of strength are destined to reach
fourscore, of whom he can see a number still in reasonably good
condition. The octogenarian loves to read about people of ninety and
over. He peers among the asterisks of the triennial catalogue of the
University for the names of graduates who have been seventy years out of
college and remain still unstarred. He is curious about the biographies
of centenarians. Such escapades as those of that terrible old sinner and
ancestor of great men, the Reverend Stephen Bachelder, interest him as
they never did before. But he cannot deceive himself much longer. See
him walking on a level surface, and he steps off almost