When I was a child a dear old lady, who had been asking questions about my lessons, laid her gentle hand on my head and said, "I see you love school, my child. 'Learn young, learn fair.'"
You, dear girl friends, will be at no loss to understand the teaching of the proverb. It says, in few words, that those lessons which are early imprinted on our minds are likely to have an abiding place in our memories and a lasting influence over our lives.
There is one lesson amongst many which we ought to be constantly learning from the time that we can understand anything. It is, how to grow old.
Do I see some of you smiling at each other, as if old age were such a far-away subject that it ought not to be introduced to my great gathering of girls? Why, if I could have spoken to you as children, one by one, I would have asked, "Are you learning how to grow old?"
You ought to be, for the moment you began to live you started on the path that leads to old age. From that path none of us can turn aside and, perhaps without thinking much of the inevitable ending, we pursue our course thereon steadily and uninterruptedly. We may start on many other paths—those of duty, work, mental culture, etc.—and we may take up certain pursuits and relinquish them at our will, but the one onward journey is continuous. We travel by night and by day. Sleeping or waking, resting or working, we are ever progressing towards old age, whether we live to reach it or not.
It is often said that every age has its special beauty, and yet I daresay many of you have never dreamed of associating the idea of beauty with old age. You are apt to claim it as the special prerogative of youth. Yet I believe that old age may be—and I assert that it ought to be in certain senses—the most beautiful of all, despite the white hair, the tremulous hand, the feeble step which seeks support from the strong arm of the young, and the wrinkles on brows that were once as smooth and fair as the fairest amongst yours.
The young often shrink from the very thought of being old. One hears the girl in her teens whisper to her companion, as she glances at a third who is not out of her twenties, "She is getting to look quite old already. She might be five-and-thirty."
The tone is half pitying, half disparaging, as if the object of the remark were somehow in fault because a few more years had passed over her young head than over the speaker's.