Do you say that old age is unfeeling?  It has not vital energy enough to supply the waste of the more exhausting emotions.  Old Men’s Tears, which furnished the mournful title to Joshua Scottow’s Lamentations, do not suggest the deepest grief conceivable.  A little breath of wind brings down the raindrops which have gathered on the leaves of the tremulous poplars.  A very slight suggestion brings the tears from Marlborough’s eyes, but they are soon over, and he is smiling again as an allusion carries him back to the days of Blenheim and Malplaquet.  Envy not the old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it sometimes looks like apathy.  Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag.  He does not cut, but he stuns and stupefies.  One’s fellow-mortals can afford to be as considerate and tender with him as Time and Nature.

There was not much boasting among us of our present or our past, as we sat together in the little room at the great hotel.  A certain amount of self-deception is quite possible at threescore years and ten, but at three score years and twenty Nature has shown most of those who live to that age that she is earnest, and means to dismantle and have done with them in a very little while.  As for boasting of our past, the laudator temporis acti makes but a poor figure in our time.  Old people used to talk of their youth as if there were giants in those days.  We knew some tall men when we were young, but we can see a man taller than any one among them at the nearest dime museum.  We had handsome women among us, of high local reputation, but nowadays we have professional beauties who challenge the world to criticise them as boldly as Phryne ever challenged her Athenian admirers.  We had fast horses,—­did not “Old Blue” trot a mile in three minutes?  True, but there is a three-year-old colt just put on the track who has done it in a little more than two thirds of that time.  It seems as if the material world had been made over again since we were boys.  It is but a short time since we were counting up the miracles we had lived to witness.  The list is familiar enough:  the railroad, the ocean steamer, photography, the spectroscope, the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, anesthetics, electric illumination,—­with such lesser wonders as the friction match, the sewing machine, and the bicycle.  And now, we said, we must have come to the end of these unparalleled developments of the forces of nature.  We must rest on our achievements.  The nineteenth century is not likely to add to them; we must wait for the twentieth century.  Many of us, perhaps most of us, felt in that way.  We had seen our planet furnished by the art of man with a complete nervous system:  a spinal cord beneath the ocean, secondary centres,—­ganglions,—­in all the chief places where men are gathered together, and ramifications extending throughout civilization.  All at once, by the side of this talking and light-giving apparatus, we see another wire stretched over our heads, carrying force to a vast metallic muscular system,—­a slender cord conveying the strength of a hundred men, of a score of horses, of a team of elephants.  The lightning is tamed and harnessed, the thunderbolt has become a common carrier.  No more surprises in this century!  A voice whispers, What next?