"ON GROWING OLD."
By NEAL BROWN.
Read before the Phantom Club, Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, April
15, 1913.
... Growing old has many stages. You can remember the time when, in
reading your favorite author, you were disgusted to find that he had
made his hero forty years old, and you wondered how he could be guilty
of imputing romance to such an unconscionable age. By and by, even
though you found forty years to be the old age of youth, you were
solaced by the thought that it was the youth of old age, and still
later you will wonder where youth ends and old age begins.
In many assemblages you once found yourself the youngest man, or among
the youngest. But with swift-flying years, you finally found yourself
equal in age to most of those in all assemblies; but the time comes
when only younger men are crowding around you. And when you try to
evade the thought that you are growing old, along comes some kindly
friend with the greeting, "How young you are looking."
You grow to regard as babes, wild, young blades of forty or fifty. You
may comfort yourself with the thought expressed by Holmes. He says
that he could feel fairly immune from death as long as older men whom
he knew, still remained, especially if they were of a much greater age
than himself. They were farther out on the skirmish line, and must be
taken first.