Verse 29: And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years; and he died.
It was about time he died. Nine hundred and fifty years ought to satisfy any man. In my family, barring accidents and diseases, we live to be ninety or ninety-six, and I ask you, frankly, how you can expect me to fret and worry and be agedly philosophical when I am still only a young tart of fifty. It is too much to ask of me.
At fifty, I feel myself just reaching my full powers, mentally and physically; capable of more work and better work, more play and better play, and with so many years of work and play ahead of me that I never so much as think of my age or of being any age. I am keen and eager to get right at the next job I have on hand, and to make it a better piece of work than any I have ever done.
The great expectations are not all on the younger side of fifty. But the great satisfactions are nearly all on the onward side of it. Life is not an up-one-side, down-the-other-side hill. It is a long, winding road, good all the way, and the freshest, brightest flowers and the sweetest, solidest fruit usually grow beyond the fifty-year mile-post.
At twenty my life was a feverish adventure, at thirty it was a problem, at forty it was a labor, at fifty it is a joyful journey well begun.
THE END