CHAPTER VII
WE NEEDN'T GET OLD
'When my next birthday comes,' once said to me Oliver Wendell Holmes, 'I shall be eighty years young.' And he looked it—young, cheerful, with a kind, merry twinkle in his eyes.
'And,' I said to him, 'to what in particular do you attribute your youth? To good health and careful living, I suppose?'
'Well, yes,' he replied, 'to a certain extent, but chiefly to a cheerful disposition and invariable contentment, in every period of my life, with what I was. I have never felt the pangs of ambition.'
'You needn't,' I remarked. 'The most ambitious man would have been content with being what you have been—what you are.'
'Happiness, which has contentment for its invariable cause, is within the reach of practically everyone,' the amiable doctor asserted. 'It is restlessness, ambition, discontent, and disquietude that make us grow old prematurely by carving wrinkles on our faces. Wrinkles do not appear on faces that have constantly smiled. Smiling is the best possible massage. Contentment is the Fountain of Youth.'
That same evening he was the guest at a banquet given by a Boston club, to which I had been kindly invited. When he rose to make a speech, they cheered and applauded to the echo. His face was radiant, beautiful. After he sat down, I said to him: