have still seldomer needed one. But up to seven I lived exclusively on
allopathic medicines. Not that I needed them, for I don't think I did;
it was for economy; my father took a drug-store for a debt, and it
made cod-liver oil cheaper than the other breakfast foods. We had nine
barrels of it, and it lasted me seven years. Then I was weaned. The rest
of the family had to get along with rhubarb and ipecac and such things,
because I was the pet. I was the first Standard Oil Trust. I had it all.
By the time the drugstore was exhausted my health was established, and
there has never been much the matter with me since. But you know very
well it would be foolish for the average child to start for seventy on
that basis. It happened to be just the thing for me, but that was merely
an accident; it couldn't happen again in a century.
I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I
never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any
benefit when you are tired; and I was always tired. But let another
person try my way, and see where he will come out. I desire now to
repeat and emphasise that maxim: We can't reach old age by another man's
road. My habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you.
I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other
people to try that, or for me to recommend it. Very few would succeed:
you have to have a perfectly colossal stock of morals; and you can't get
them on a margin; you have to have the whole thing, and put them in your
box. Morals are an acquirement—like music, like a foreign language, like
piety, poker, paralysis—no man is born with them. I wasn't myself, I
started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this
house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that—the world
before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can
remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the
weather, the—I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral,
an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit, anyway. But
if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place,
and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's Fairs, and so
on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash
once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and
how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got
that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she hadn't any
exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under
this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and
served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then
she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and
character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for
business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her—ah,
pathetic skeleton, as she was—I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of
Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to
get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high,
and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it
will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match.
Morals are of inestimable value, for every man is born crammed with sin
microbes, and the only thing that can extirpate these sin microbes
is morals. Now you take a sterilized Christian—I mean, you take the
sterilized Christian, for there's only one. Dear sir, I wish you
wouldn't look at me like that.
Threescore years and ten!
It is the Scriptural statute of limitations. After that, you owe
no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a
time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: You have served your
term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an
honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are
not for you, nor any bugle-call but “lights out.” You pay the time-worn
duty bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer—and without
prejudice—for they are not legally collectable.
The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so many
twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave you will
never need it again. If you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and
the late home-coming from the banquet and the lights and the laughter
through the deserted streets—a desolation which would not remind you
now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping, and you
must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you
that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more—if you shrink
at thought of these things, you need only reply, “Your invitation honors
me, and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but I
am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke
my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all
affection; and that when you in your return shall arrive at pier No. 70
you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay
your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart.”