another main thing--I have been
persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn't agree with me
until one or the other of us got the best of it. Until lately I got the
best of it myself. But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince-pie
after midnight; up to then I had always believed it wasn't loaded. For
thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and
no bite nor sup until seven-thirty in the evening. Eleven hours. That is
all right for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a headache
in my life, but headachy people would not reach seventy comfortably by
that road, and they would be foolish to try it. And I wish to urge
upon you this--which I think is wisdom--that if you find you can't make
seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don't you go. When they take
off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put on your things,
count your checks, and get out at the first way station where there's a
cemetery.

I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I
have no other restriction as regards smoking. I do not know just when
I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father's lifetime, and
that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I
was a shade past eleven; ever since then I have smoked publicly. As an
example to others, and--not that I care for moderation myself, it has
always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain
when awake. It is a good rule. I mean, for me; but some of you know
quite well that it wouldn't answer for everybody that's trying to get to
be seventy.

I smoke in bed until I have to go to sleep; I wake up in the night,
sometimes once, sometimes twice; sometimes three times, and I never
waste any of these opportunities to smoke. This habit is so old and
dear and precious to me that I would feel as you, sir, would feel if you
should lose the only moral you've got--meaning the chairman--if you've
got one: I am making no charges: I will grant, here, that I have stopped
smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on
principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics
who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds.

To-day it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit. I
have never bought cigars with life-belts around them. I early found
that those were too expensive for me: I have always bought cheap
cigars--reasonabl