To-day it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit.  I have never bought cigars with life-belts around them.  I early found that those were too expensive for me:  I have always bought cheap cigars —­reasonably cheap, at any rate.  Sixty years ago they cost me four dollars a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven, now.  Six or seven.  Seven, I think.  Yes; it’s seven.  But that includes the barrel.  I often have smoking-parties at my house; but the people that come have always just taken the pledge.  I wonder why that is?

As for drinking, I have no rule about that.  When the others drink I like to help; otherwise I remain dry, by habit and preference.  This dryness does not hurt me, but it could easily hurt you, because you are different.  You let it alone.

Since I was seven years old I have seldom take, a dose of medicine, and have still seldomer needed one.  But up to seven I lived exclusively on allopathic medicines.  Not that I needed them, for I don’t think I did; it was for economy; my father took a drug-store for a debt, and it made cod-liver oil cheaper than the other breakfast foods.  We had nine barrels of it, and it lasted me seven years.  Then I was weaned.  The rest of the family had to get along with rhubarb and ipecac and such things, because I was the pet.  I was the first Standard Oil Trust.  I had it all.  By the time the drugstore was exhausted my health was established, and there has never been much the matter with me since.  But you know very well it would be foolish for the average child to start for seventy on that basis.  It happened to be just the thing for me, but that was merely an accident; it couldn’t happen again in a century.

I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any.  Exercise is loathsome.  And it cannot be any benefit when you are tired; and I was always tired.  But let another person try my way, and see where he will come out.  I desire now to repeat and emphasise that maxim:  We can’t reach old age by another man’s road.  My habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you.

I have lived a severely moral life.  But it would be a mistake for other people to try that, or for me to recommend it.  Very few would succeed:  you have to have a perfectly colossal stock of morals; and you can’t get them on a margin; you have to have the whole thing, and put them in your box.  Morals are an acquirement—­like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis—­no man is born with them.  I wasn’t myself, I started poor.  I hadn’t a single moral.  There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then.  Yes, I started like that—­the world before me, not a moral in the slot.  Not even an insurance moral.  I can remember the first one I ever got.  I can remember the landscape, the weather, the—­I can remember how everything looked.  It was an old moral, an old second-hand