THE CENTENARIAN[15]
By WILL E. INGERSOLL
From Harper's Magazine
There were few who knew—and, frankly, there were few who seemed to care to know—what Old Dalton meant when he mumbled, in his aspirate and toothless quest for expression of the thoughts that doddered through his misty old brain, "Thay wur-rld luks diff'rent now—all diff'rent now, yagh!" Sometimes he would go on, after a pause, in a kind of laborious elucidation: "Na, na! Ma there, now, she's gone. I—egh, egh—I went to school 'long of her; an' et didn't matter so much, mun, about th' rest going, 's long as she wer' here. But now—she's gone, ey. Agh-m! Ey, now she's gone-like, an' th' ain't nobody to help me keep—keep a-hold o' things. I'm a hundred years old, mun. Agh-m! You wouldn't—you wouldn't know what I was meanin', now, when I tell you this here world has growed all yellow-like, this month back. Ey, that's it, mun—all queer-like. Egh, it's time I was movin' on—movin' on."
Part of this monologue—a very small part—was Old Dalton's own, repeated over and over, and so kept in mind ever since the more initiative years a decade ago when he first began to think about his age. Another part of the utterance—more particularly that about "movin' on"—consisted of scraps of remarks that had been addressed to him, which he had hoarded up as an ape lays away odds and ends, and which he repeated, parrotlike, when the sun and his pipe warmed Old Dalton into speech. But that idea that the earth was growing yellow—that was a recent uncanny turn of his fancy, his own entirely.
He was pretty well past having any very definite inclination, but there seemed no special reason why the old man should wish to "move on." He appeared comfortable enough, pulling away at his blackened old pipe on the bench by the door. No man above fifty, and few below that age, enjoyed better health than he had; and many of fifty there are who look nearer death than Old Dalton did.
"Crack me a stick 'r two o' wood, grampa," his married great-granddaughter, with whom he lived, would sometimes say; and up and at it the old man would get—swinging his ax handily and hitting his notch cleanly at every clip.
Assuredly, his body was a wonderful old machine—a grandfather's clock with every wheel, bearing, and spring in perfect order and alignment. Work had made it so, and work kept it so, for every day after his smoke Old Dalton would fuss about at his "chores" (which, partly to please him, were designedly left for him to do)—the changing of the bull's tether-picket, watering the old horse, splitting the evening's wood, keeping the fence about the house in repair, and driving the cows o' nights into the milking-pen.
To every man in this world is assigned his duty. To every man is given just the mental and physical equipment he needs for that duty. Some men obtusely face away from their appointed work; some are carried afield by exigency; some are drawn by avarice or ambition into alien paths; but a minor proportion of happy ones follow out their destiny. There do not occur many exceptions to the rule that the men who find their work and do it, all other conditions being equal, not only live to old age, but to an extreme, a desirable, a comfortable, and a natural old age.