to my first banquet just like that.  Well, everybody came swarming in.  It was the merest little bit of a village—­hardly that, just a little hamlet, in the backwoods of Missouri, where nothing ever happened, and the people were all interested, and they all came; they looked me over to see if there was anything fresh in my line.  Why, nothing ever happened in that village —­I—­why, I was the only thing that had really happened there for months and months and months; and although I say it myself that shouldn’t, I came the nearest to being a real event that had happened in that village in more than, two years.  Well, those people came, they came with that curiosity which is so provincial, with that frankness which also is so provincial, and they examined me all around and gave their opinion.  Nobody asked them, and I shouldn’t have minded if anybody had paid me a compliment, but nobody did.  Their opinions were all just green with prejudice, and I feel those opinions to this day.  Well, I stood that as long as—­well, you know I was born courteous, and I stood it to the limit.  I stood it an hour, and then the worm turned.  I was the warm; it was my turn to turn, and I turned.  I knew very well the strength of my position; I knew that I was the only spotlessly pure and innocent person in that whole town, and I came out and said so:  And they could not say a word.  It was so true:  They blushed; they were embarrassed.  Well, that was the first after-dinner speech I ever made:  I think it was after dinner.

It’s a long stretch between that first birthday speech and this one.  That was my cradle-song; and this is my swan-song, I suppose.  I am used to swan-songs; I have sung them several, times.

This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the size of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase, seventieth birthday.

The seventieth birthday!  It is the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach—­unrebuked.  You can tell the world how you got there.  It is what they all do.  You shall never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you climbed up to that great place.  You will explain the process and dwell on the particulars with senile rapture.  I have been anxious to explain my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right.

I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way:  by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else.  It sounds like an exaggeration, but that is really the common rule for attaining to old age.  When we examine the programme of any of these garrulous old people we always find that the habits which have preserved them would have decayed us; that the way of life which enabled them to live upon the property of their heirs so long, as Mr. Choate says, would have put us out of commission ahead of time.  I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this:  That we can’t reach old age by another man’s road.