Oh, if we could all go out of flower as gracefully, as pleasingly, as we come into blossom!  I always think of the morning-glory as the loveliest example of a graceful yielding to the inevitable.  It is beautiful before its twisted corolla opens; it is comely as it folds its petals inward, when its brief hours of perfection are over.  Women find it easier than men to grow old in a becoming way.  A very old lady who has kept something, it may be a great deal, of her youthful feelings, who is daintily cared for, who is grateful for the attentions bestowed upon her, and enters into the spirit of the young lives that surround her, is as precious to those who love her as a gem in an antique setting, the fashion of which has long gone by, but which leaves the jewel the color and brightness which are its inalienable qualities.  With old men it is too often different.  They do not belong so much indoors as women do.  They have no pretty little manual occupations.  The old lady knits or stitches so long as her eyes and fingers will let her.  The old man smokes his pipe, but does not know what to do with his fingers, unless he plays upon some instrument, or has a mechanical turn which finds business for them.

But the old writer, I said to The Teacups, as I say to you, my readers, labors under one special difficulty, which I am thinking of and exemplifying at this moment.  He is constantly tending to reflect upon and discourse about his own particular stage of life.  He feels that he must apologize for his intrusion upon the time and thoughts of a generation which he naturally supposes must be tired of him, if they ever had any considerable regard for him.  Now, if the world of readers hates anything it sees in print, it is apology.  If what one has to say is worth saying, he need not beg pardon fur saying it.  If it is not worth saying I will not finish the sentence.  But it is so hard to resist the temptation, notwithstanding that the terrible line beginning “Superfluous lags the veteran” is always repeating itself in his dull ear!

What kind of audience or reading parish is a man who secured his constituency in middle life, or before that period, to expect when he has reached the age of threescore and twenty?  His coevals have dropped away by scores and tens, and he sees only a few units scattered about here and there, like the few beads above the water after a ship has gone to pieces.  Does he write and publish for those of his own time of life?  He need not print a large edition.  Does he hope to secure a hearing from those who have come into the reading world since his coevals?  They have found fresher fields and greener pastures.  Their interests are in the out-door, active world.  Some of them are circumnavigating the planet while he is hitching his rocking chair about his hearth-rug.  Some are gazing upon the pyramids while he is staring at his andirons.  Some are settling the tariff and fixing the laws of suffrage and taxation while he is dozing over the weather bulletin, and going to sleep over the obituaries in his morning or evening paper.