y cheap, at any rate. Sixty years ago they cost me four
dollars a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven,
now. Six or seven. Seven, I think. Yes; it's seven. But that includes
the barrel. I often have smoking-parties at my house; but the people
that come have always just taken the pledge. I wonder why that is?

As for drinking, I have no rule about that. When the others drink I like
to help; otherwise I remain dry, by habit and preference. This dryness
does not hurt me, but it could easily hurt you, because you are
different. You let it alone.

Since I was seven years old I have seldom take, a dose of medicine, and
have still seldomer needed one. But up to seven I lived exclusively on
allopathic medicines. Not that I needed them, for I don't think I did;
it was for economy; my father took a drug-store for a debt, and it
made cod-liver oil cheaper than the other breakfast foods. We had nine
barrels of it, and it lasted me seven years. Then I was weaned. The rest
of the family had to get along with rhubarb and ipecac and such things,
because I was the pet. I was the first Standard Oil Trust. I had it all.
By the time the drugstore was exhausted my health was established, and
there has never been much the matter with me since. But you know very
well it would be foolish for the average child to start for seventy on
that basis. It happened to be just the thing for me, but that was merely
an accident; it couldn't happen again in a century.

I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I
never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any
benefit when you are tired; and I was always tired. But let another
person try my way, and see where he will come out. I desire now to
repeat and emphasise that maxim: We can't reach old age by another man's
road. My habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you.

I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other
people to try that, or for me to recommend it. Very few would succeed:
you have to have a perfectly colossal stock of morals; and you can't get
them on a margin; you have to have the whole thing, and put them in your
box. Morals are an acquirement--like music, like a foreign language,
like piety, poker, paralysis--no man is born with them. I wasn't myself,
I started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this
house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that--th