may yet have to learn a lesson of their American cousins, for
notwithstanding their compact and solid structure they go to pieces in
the great winds just as ours do. We must drop much of our foliage before
winter is upon us. We must take in sail and throw over cargo, if that is
necessary, to keep us afloat. We have to decide between our duties and
our instinctive demand of rest. I can believe that some have welcomed
the decay of their active powers because it furnished them with
peremptory reasons for sparing themselves during the few years that were
left them.

Age brings other obvious changes besides the loss of active power. The
sensibilities are less keen, the intelligence is less lively, as
we might expect under the influence of that narcotic which Nature
administers. But there is another effect of her "black drop" which is
not so commonly recognized. Old age is like an opium-dream. Nothing
seems real except what is unreal. I am sure that the pictures painted by
the imagination,--the faded frescos on the walls of memory,--come out
in clearer and brighter colors than belonged to them many years earlier.
Nature has her special favors for her children of every age, and this is
one which she reserves for our second childhood.

No man can reach an advanced age without thinking of that great change
to which, in the course of nature, he must be so near. It has been
remarked that the sterner beliefs of rigid theologians are apt to soften
in their later years. All reflecting persons, even those whose minds
have been half palsied by the deadly dogmas which have done all they
could to disorganize their thinking powers,--all reflecting persons, I
say, must recognize, in looking back over a long life, how largely their
creeds, their course of life, their wisdom and unwisdom, their whole
characters, were shaped by the conditions which surrounded them. Little
children they came from the hands of the Father of all; little children
in their helplessness, their ignorance, they are going back to Him.
They cannot help feeling that they are to be transferred from the
rude embrace of the boisterous elements to arms that will receive them
tenderly. Poor planetary foundlings, they have known hard treatment at
the hands of the brute forces of nature, from the control of which they
are soon to be set free. There are some old pessimists, it is true,
who believe that they and a few others are on a raft, and that the ship
which they have quit