Especially avoid the mistake of making your own “last will and testament” unless you have great legal skillfulness.  Better leave no will at all than one inefficiently constructed.  The “Orphans’ Court” could tell many a tragedy of property distributed adverse to the intention of the testator.  You save twenty to a hundred dollars from your counsel by writing your own will, and your heirs pay ten thousand dollars to lawyers in disputes over it.  Perhaps those whom you have wished especially to favor will get the least of your estate, and a relative against whom you always had especial dislike will get the most, and your charities will be apportioned differently from what you anticipated—­a hundred dollars to the Bible Society, and three thousand to the “hook and ladder company.”

Quizzle.—­Do you not think, governor (to go back to the subject from which we wandered), that your good spirits have had much to do with your good health?

Wiseman.—­No doubt.  I see no reason why, because I am advancing in years, I should become melancholy.

One of the heartiest things I have seen of late is the letter of Rev. Dr. Dowling as he retires from active work in the ministry.  He hands over his work to the younger brethren without sigh, or groan, or regret.  He sees the sun is quite far down in the west, and he feels like hanging up his scythe in the first apple tree he comes to.  Our opinion is that he has made a little mistake in the time of day, and that while he thinks it is about half-past five in the afternoon, it is only about three.  I guess his watch is out of order, and that he has been led to think it later than it really is.  But when we remember how much good he has done, we will not begrudge him his rest either here or hereafter.

At any rate, taking the doctor’s cheerful valedictory for a text, I might preach a little bit of a sermon on the best way of getting old.  Do not be fretted because you have to come to spectacles.  While glasses look premature on a young man’s nose, they are an adornment on an octogenarian’s face.  Besides that, when your eyesight is poor, you miss seeing a great many unpleasant things that youngsters are obliged to look at.

Do not be worried because your ear is becoming dull.  In that way you escape being bored with many of the foolish things that are said.  If the gates of sound keep out some of the music, they also keep out much of the discord.  If the hair be getting thin, it takes less time to comb it, and then it is not all the time falling down over your eyes; or if it be getting white, I think that color is quite as respectable as any other:  that is the color of the snow, and of the blossoms, and of the clouds, and of angelic habiliments.