I will now teach, offering my way of life to whomsoever desires to commit suicide by the scheme which has enabled me to beat the doctor and the hangman for seventy years.  Some of the details may sound untrue, but they are not.  I am not here to deceive; I am here to teach.

We have no permanent habits until we are forty.  Then they begin to harden, presently they petrify, then business begins.  Since forty I have been regular about going to bed and getting up—­and that is one of the main things.  I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn’t anybody left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I had to.  This has resulted in an unswerving regularity of irregularity.  It has saved me sound, but it would injure another person.

In the matter of diet—­which is another main thing—­I have been persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn’t agree with me until one or the other of us got the best of it.  Until lately I got the best of it myself.  But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince-pie after midnight; up to then I had always believed it wasn’t loaded.  For thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and no bite nor sup until seven-thirty in the evening.  Eleven hours.  That is all right for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a headache in my life, but headachy people would not reach seventy comfortably by that road, and they would be foolish to try it.  And I wish to urge upon you this—­which I think is wisdom—­that if you find you can’t make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don’t you go.  When they take off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put on your things, count your checks, and get out at the first way station where there’s a cemetery.

I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.  I have no other restriction as regards smoking.  I do not know just when I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father’s lifetime, and that I was discreet.  He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was a shade past eleven; ever since then I have smoked publicly.  As an example to others, and—­not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake.  It is a good rule.  I mean, for me; but some of you know quite well that it wouldn’t answer for everybody that’s trying to get to be seventy.

I smoke in bed until I have to go to sleep; I wake up in the night, sometimes once, sometimes twice; sometimes three times, and I never waste any of these opportunities to smoke.  This habit is so old and dear and precious to me that I would feel as you, sir, would feel if you should lose the only moral you’ve got—­meaning the chairman—­if you’ve got one:  I am making no charges:  I will grant, here, that I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn’t break my bonds.