t observation bears me out in the
suspicion that the merry speaker only uttered the thought of many
others.

"The years of man's life are three-score-and-ten," says the Word of
Him who made man and knew what was in man. The wearer of a body that,
with tolerably good treatment ought to last for seventy years, must
then, according to popular judgment, spend nearly half of that time in
learning how to play his part in the world, barely a fifth in carrying
out God's designs in and for him, and then remain for a quarter of a
century a cumberer of the home and earth. Such waste of strength, time
and accumulated capital would be cried out upon as wretched
mismanagement were the scheme of human devising.

The French proverb that "a woman" (and presumably a man) "is just as
old as she chooses to be," comes so much nearer what I believe was our
Creator's wise and merciful purpose in giving us life, that I turn
thankfully and hopefully to this side of the subject.

The best way to avoid growing old is not to be afraid of getting along
in years. To come down to "hard pan"--whence originates this
unwholesome dread of ripeness and maturity? It surely is not a fear of
death that makes us blanch and shrink back at the oft-recurring
mile-stones in the journey of life that brings all of us nearer the
goal towards which we are bound.

I once heard a young woman say, seriously:

"I hope that when I am forty-five, I may quietly die. I do not dread
death, but I do shudder at the idea of being laid on the shelf."

I do not mean to be severe when I assert that, nine times out of ten,
it is the victim's own fault that she is pushed out of the way, or, as
our slangy youth of to-day put it, "is not in it." It is your business
and mine to _be_ in it, heart, soul, and body, and to keep our places
there by every effort in our power. A fear of that which is high, or
mental or physical inertia, or, to be less euphemistic and more exact,
laziness--should not deter us. This object is not to be accomplished
by adopting juvenile dress and kittenish ways. We should beautify old
age, not accentuate it by artificial means. When your roadster,
advanced in years and woefully stiff in the joints, makes a lame
attempt to imitate a gamboling colt, and feebly elevates his hind
legs, and pretends to shy at a piece of paper in the road, you smile
with contemptuous amusement and say:

"The old fool is in his dotage!"

But if he keeps on steadily to his work