e long used only
the number. Now the name seems rather more absurd than ever. Its
pretentiousness is out of tune with these times. I think many of us are
getting ashamed of our little vanities without the help of the
tax-collector.

ON THOUGHTS AT FIFTY

Stevenson, it will be remembered, once assigned his birthday to a little
girl--or was it a boy?--of his acquaintance. The child was fond of
birthdays, while he had reached a time of life when they had ceased to have
any interest for him. Most of us, if we live long enough, experience that
indifference. The birthday emotion vanishes with the toys that awaken it. I
remember when life was a journey from one birthday to another, the tedium
of which was only relieved by such agreeable incidents as Christmas,
Easter, and the school holidays. But for many years I have stumbled up
against my birthday, as it were, with a shock of surprise, have given it a
nod of recognition as one might greet an ancient acquaintance with whom one
has lost sympathy, and have passed on without a further thought about the
occasion.

But to-day it is different. One cannot pass over one's fiftieth birthday
without feeling that an event has happened. Fifty! Why, the Psalmist's
limit is only seventy. Fifty from seventy. An easy sum, but what an
impressive answer! Twenty years, and they the years of the sere, the yellow
leaf. Only twenty more times to hear the cuckoo calling over the valley and
see the dark beech woods bursting into tender green. I look back twenty
years, and it seems only a span. And yet how remote fifty seemed in those
days! It was so remote as to be hardly worth thinking about. To be fifty
was to be among the old fellows, to be on the shelf, to have become an
antiquity.

And now here am I at fifty, and so far from feeling like an antiquity, I
feel as much of a young fellow as at any time of my life. I had feared that
when middle age overtook me I should feel middle-aged and full of sad
longings for the old toys and the old pleasures. How would life be
tolerable when cricket, for example, had ceased to play an important part
in it? Never again to have the ecstasy of a drive along "the carpet" to the
boundary or, with a flash of the arm, snapping an opponent in the slips.
What a dreary desolation life must be, stripped of those joys! And on the
contrary I find that the spirit of youth is no more dependent on cricket
than it is on the taste for lollipops. It consists in the