There are strange diversities in the way in which different old persons look upon their prospects.  A millionaire whom I well remember confessed that he should like to live long enough to learn how much a certain fellow-citizen, a multimillionaire, was worth.  One of the, three nonagenarians before referred to expressed himself as having a great curiosity about the new sphere of existence to which he was looking forward.

The feeling must of necessity come to many aged persons that they have outlived their usefulness; that they are no longer wanted, but rather in the way, drags on the wheels rather than helping them forward.  But let them remember the often-quoted line of Milton,

   “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

This is peculiarly true of them.  They are helping others without always being aware of it.  They are the shields, the breakwaters, of those who come after them.  Every decade is a defence of the one next behind it.  At thirty the youth has sobered into manhood, but the strong men of forty rise in almost unbroken rank between him and the approaches of old age as they show in the men of fifty.  At forty he looks with a sense of security at the strong men of fifty, and sees behind them the row of sturdy sexagenarians.  When fifty is reached, somehow sixty does not look so old as it once used to, and seventy is still afar off.  After sixty the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years.  There begins to be something personal about it.  But if one lives to seventy he soon gets used to the text with the threescore years and ten in it, and begins to count himself among those who by reason of strength are destined to reach fourscore, of whom he can see a number still in reasonably good condition.  The octogenarian loves to read about people of ninety and over.  He peers among the asterisks of the triennial catalogue of the University for the names of graduates who have been seventy years out of college and remain still unstarred.  He is curious about the biographies of centenarians.  Such escapades as those of that terrible old sinner and ancestor of great men, the Reverend Stephen Bachelder, interest him as they never did before.  But he cannot deceive himself much longer.  See him walking on a level surface, and he steps off almost as well as ever; but watch him coming down a flight of stairs, and the family record could not tell his years more faithfully.  He cut you dead, you say?  Did it occur to you that he could not see you clearly enough to know you from any other son or daughter of Adam?  He said he was very glad to hear it, did he, when you told him that your beloved grandmother had just deceased?  Did you happen to remember that though he does not allow that he is deaf, he will not deny that he does not hear quite so well as he used to?  No matter about his failings; the longer he holds on to life, the longer he makes life seem to all the living who follow him, and thus he is their constant benefactor.