Old folks do not acquire wisdom in a natural way; that is, as they acquire short breath, puckered lips, gray hairs, crowsfeet, weak knees and shuffling feet. Habit is habit. Idle youth—idle age. I love books as much and as fondly as when I was in my father’s garret. But my glasses are too young for me, and McAlister is five hundred miles away, and folios are hard to manage, and my grand-daughter is in peril of laryngitis by reading so loud to me, and my eyes close in the middle of periods, and my pipe goes out ten times a-day.
When I was young I thought life pleasant, but I also thought that after three-score I should be ready to yield it without a sigh. I do not know how it is, but my love of life has a tenacity as tough as my corded fingers. Every preparation for “that vast ocean I must sail so soon” is induced ab extra. The instinctive tendency is to live a little longer.
In old age I fancy myself not very much attended to. This I suppress; but for the life of me I cannot help observing that in all companies my chair becomes insular. The young men prefer learning of the young women. The young women attend to me sweetly—but as it were by afterthought, from sense of duty.
As an old man, I perceive that young creatures are too gay. The loud laugh reaches me, but I have lost the bon mot which caused it. The books they are in raptures about are not in my collection. Was I ever thus? And did those grave looks of my seniors proceed from something like this in their heedless offspring? Heigh-ho! It is time for me to look for hat and stick, as a conviva satur.
The teeth which Gardette furnished me are the admiration of all companies; and I speak with only a perceptible click produced by the play of the gold and porcelain. Yet what I say is evidently less relished than when I used to be in blue broad-cloth and hair-powder, and with six unstarched cravats about my neck. My Latin quotations are unintelligible, for I retain the old continental sound of the vowels, and cannot break my organs into the Anglicism of payter, frayter, and nigh-sigh, for pater, frater, and nisi. I can’t learn to change the Spanish Quijote into Quixotte, with a double T; or to talk “of paying over over ten dollars,” when I mean “paying over more than ten dollars.” Alice has never found her favorite “reliable” in any English author before the days of Sir Robert Peel; or any classic writer who ever uttered the phrase “on to-morrow.” I am old-fashioned enough to present to each other visitors who meet at a morning call, and to show them to the door; nor can I wear my hat in the house, bald as I am. Quere. Whether Methusalem had these disabilities in proportion to his longinquity?
| [1] | I may be in error, but so my Commissionaire Jean d’Ypres told me. |
——
CHAPTER XVI.
“He is insensibly subdued