CONCLUSION

It is April 23d, 1900.  Three hundred and thirty-six years ago to-day a man named Shakespeare was born.  He lived with some gnawing at his heart, wrote some plays, and died.  He was wise enough, I fancy, to see that the joke is on those who remain in life, not those who leave it.  Eighty-seven years ago to-day Stephen A. Douglas was born.  He lived, stormed about these States, talked of great principles, was tossed aside by a squall on the universe of things, and died.  It is now thirty-nine years since he summed up his life’s wisdom in the words:  “Tell my children to obey the laws and support the Constitution.”  That was about the summation of Socrates’ wisdom, this matter of the laws, as he lay in prison opposite the Acropolis.  He refused to walk forth free, except by the law.  If I live until June the eighteenth I shall be eighty-five years of age.  On the score of age I should feel much wiser than Douglas who died at forty-eight and Socrates who died at sixty.  I feel that I am a good deal like Shakespeare.  I have very little respect for the laws—­at least for the written laws.  I am not so sure about the higher law, if I am left to determine it.  But in truth I am a good deal in doubt as to what is right, and what is wrong, what good and what evil.  And I never know what the law is.  I have wondered about it all my life.  I have thought at times I knew, but I have been for the most part betrayed and fooled.

And why not now?  Miss Sharpe, delicate, spiritual, active of mind, lives at the boarding house where I do.  She thinks I am a fine old gentleman.  She likes my society.  I am to her taste interesting because I am experienced.  I am richer intellectually than any man could be at an earlier age.  She reads to me, often reads to me: 

“Grow old along with me,
The best is yet to be,
The last of life for which the first was made.”

How glorious is old age!  She comforts me, makes me contented with my state at times; she makes me forget how I feel when I rise in the morning, stiff, bewildered, sometimes wondering where I am.  She helps me to establish my mind when it thinks of too many things at once, and cannot choose for paltering and fumbling.  I walk with a cane; but legs are nothing.  The soul is the prize, the flower.  My food does not digest itself well; my heart flutters and stumbles; my eyes refuse to work even with the best of glasses.  The doctor says I have an old man’s arteries.  I know when my memory falters that it is due to the brain which has shrunk, and to the incrusted arteries which do not carry enough blood cells to the brain to give me memory.  Still the best is yet to be, and this is now it.  I think the law of old age will get me eventually just as the law of the new era caught Douglas and destroyed him.