Nature is wiser than we give her credit for being; never wiser than in her dealings with the old.  She has no idea of mortifying them by sudden and wholly unexpected failure of the chief servants of consciousness.  The sight, for instance, begins to lose something of its perfection long before its deficiency calls the owner’s special attention to it.  Very probably, the first hint we have of the change is that a friend makes the pleasing remark that we are “playing the trombone,” as he calls it; that is, moving a book we are holding backward and forward, to get the right focal distance.  Or it may be we find fault with the lamp or the gas-burner for not giving so much light as it used to.  At last, somewhere between forty and fifty, we begin to dangle a jaunty pair of eye-glasses, half plaything and half necessity.  In due time a pair of sober, business-like spectacles bestrides the nose.  Old age leaps upon it as his saddle, and rides triumphant, unchallenged, until the darkness comes which no glasses can penetrate.  Nature is pitiless in carrying out the universal sentence, but very pitiful in her mode of dealing with the condemned on his way to the final scene.  The man who is to be hanged always has a good breakfast provided for him.

Do not think that the old look upon themselves as the helpless, hopeless, forlorn creatures which they seem to young people.  Do these young folks suppose that all vanity dies out of the natures of old men and old women?  A dentist of olden time told me that a good-looking young man once said to him, “Keep that incisor presentable, if you can, till I am fifty, and then I sha’n’t care how I look.”  I venture to say that that gentleman was as particular about his personal appearance and as proud of his good looks at fifty, and many years after fifty, as he was in the twenties, when he made that speech to the dentist.

My dear friends around the teacups, and at that wider board where I am now entertaining, or trying to entertain, my company, is it not as plain to you as it is to me that I had better leave such tasks as that which I am just finishing to those who live in a more interesting period of life than one which, in the order of nature, is next door to decrepitude?  Ought I not to regret having undertaken to report the doings and sayings of the members of the circle which you have known as The Teacups?

Dear, faithful reader, whose patient eyes have followed my reports through these long months, you and I are about parting company.  Perhaps you are one of those who have known me under another name, in those far-off days separated from these by the red sea of the great national conflict.  When you first heard the tinkle of the teaspoons, as the table was being made ready for its guests, you trembled for me, in the kindness of your hearts.  I do not wonder that you did,—­I trembled for myself.  But I remembered the story of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, who was seen all of a tremor just as he was going