after-dinner speech I ever made: I think it was
after dinner.

It's a long stretch between that first birthday speech and this one.
That was my cradle-song; and this is my swan-song, I suppose. I am used
to swan-songs; I have sung them several, times.

This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the
size of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase,
seventieth birthday.

The seventieth birthday! It is the time of life when you arrive at a new
and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which
have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed
upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach--unrebuked. You
can tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. You shall
never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you
climbed up to that great place. You will explain the process and dwell
on the particulars with senile rapture. I have been anxious to explain
my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right.

I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly
to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else. It sounds like an
exaggeration, but that is really the common rule for attaining to old
age. When we examine the programme of any of these garrulous old people
we always find that the habits which have preserved them would have
decayed us; that the way of life which enabled them to live upon the
property of their heirs so long, as Mr. Choate says, would have put us
out of commission ahead of time. I will offer here, as a sound maxim,
this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.

I will now teach, offering my way of life to whomsoever desires to
commit suicide by the scheme which has enabled me to beat the doctor and
the hangman for seventy years. Some of the details may sound untrue, but
they are not. I am not here to deceive; I am here to teach.

We have no permanent habits until we are forty. Then they begin to
harden, presently they petrify, then business begins. Since forty I have
been regular about going to bed and getting up--and that is one of
the main things. I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn't
anybody left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I
had to. This has resulted in an unswerving regularity of irregularity.
It has saved me sound, but it would injure another person.

In the matter of diet--which is