with the effect of having
aged considerably in the interval. But this was only his latest avatar;
he was no older, as he was no younger, than before; to support a fresh
character, he had to put on an appropriate aspect, and having, at former
interviews, been a poet, a novelist, a philosopher, a reformer, a
moralist, he was now merely looking the part of a veteran observer, of a
psychologist grown gray in divining the character of others from his own
consciousness.

"Have you ever noticed," he began, "that the first things we get stiff
in, as we advance in life, are our tastes? We suppose that it is our
joints which feel the premonitions of age; and that because we no longer
wish to dance or play ball or sprint in college races we are in the
earliest stage of that sapless condition when the hinges of the body
grind dryly upon one another, and we lose a good inch of our stature,
through shrinkage, though the spine still holds us steadfastly
upright."

"Well, isn't that so?" the Easy Chair asked, tranquilly.

"It may be so, or it may not be so," the veteran observer replied.
"Ultimately, I dare say, it is so. But what I wish to enforce is the
fact that before you begin to feel the faintest sense of stiffening
joints you are allowing yourself to fall into that voluntary senescence
which I call getting stiff in the tastes. It is something that I think
we ought to guard ourselves against as a sort of mental sclerosis which
must end fatally long before we have reached the patriarchal age which
that unbelieving believer Metchnikoff says we can attain if we fight off
physical sclerosis. He can only negatively teach us how to do this, but
I maintain we can have each of us in our power the remedy against
stiffening tastes."

"I don't see how," the Easy Chair said, more to provoke the sage to
explanation than to express dissent.

"I will teach you how," he said, "if you will allow me to make it a
personal matter, and use you in illustration."

"Why not use yourself?"

"Because that would be egotistical, and the prime ingredient of my
specific against getting stiff in the tastes is that spiritual grace
which is the very antidote, the very antithesis of egotism. Up to a
certain point, a certain time, we are usefully employed in cultivating
our tastes, in refining them, and in defining them. We cannot be too
strenuous in defining them; and, as long as we are young, the
catholicity of youth will preserve us from a bigoted nar