Sometimes it seems to me almost of the nature of a misdemeanor to be wandering about in the preserve which the fleshless gamekeeper guards so jealously.  But, on the other hand, I remember that men of science have maintained that the natural life of man is nearer fivescore than threescore years and ten.  I always think of a familiar experience which I bring from the French cafes, well known to me in my early manhood.  One of the illustrated papers of my Parisian days tells it pleasantly enough.

A guest of the establishment is sitting at his little table.  He has just had his coffee, and the waiter is serving him with his petit verre.  Most of my readers know very well what a petit verre is, but there may be here and there a virtuous abstainer from alcoholic fluids, living among the bayberries and the sweet ferns, who is not aware that the words, as commonly used, signify a small glass—­a very small glass—­of spirit, commonly brandy, taken as a chasse-cafe, or coffee-chaser.  This drinking of brandy, “neat,” I may remark by the way, is not quite so bad as it looks.  Whiskey or rum taken unmixed from a tumbler is a knock-down blow to temperance, but the little thimbleful of brandy, or Chartreuse, or Maraschino, is only, as it were, tweaking the nose of teetotalism.

Well,—­to go back behind our brackets,—­the guest is calling to the waiter, “Garcon! et le bain de pieds!” Waiter! and the foot-bath!—­The little glass stands in a small tin saucer or shallow dish, and the custom is to more than fill the glass, so that some extra brandy rung over into this tin saucer or cup-plate, to the manifest gain of the consumer.

Life is a petit verre of a very peculiar kind of spirit.  At seventy years it used to be said that the little glass was full.  We should be more apt to put it at eighty in our day, while Gladstone and Tennyson and our own Whittier are breathing, moving, thinking, writing, speaking, in the green preserve belonging to their children and grandchildren, and Bancroft is keeping watch of the gamekeeper in the distance.  But, returning resolutely to the petit verre, I am willing to concede that all after fourscore is the bain de pieds,—­the slopping over, so to speak, of the full measure of life.  I remember that one who was very near and dear to me, and who lived to a great age, so that the ten-barred gate of the century did not look very far off, would sometimes apologize in a very sweet, natural way for lingering so long to be a care and perhaps a burden to her children, themselves getting well into years.  It is not hard to understand the feeling, never less called for than it was in the case of that beloved nonagenarian.  I have known few persons, young or old, more sincerely and justly regretted than the gentle lady whose memory comes up before me as I write.