I smiled, as the rattler meant I should.  But the words have stayed by me, the more persistently that 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, doing the best he can, your comment is sure to be somewhat after this fashion: 

“This is truly a wonderful horse!  He is just as good as on the day I bought him, fifteen years ago!”