And yet how remote fifty seemed in those
days! It was so remote as to be hardly worth thinking about. To be fifty
was to be among the old fellows, to be on the shelf, to have become an
antiquity.
And now here am I at fifty, and so far from feeling like an antiquity, I
feel as much of a young fellow as at any time of my life. I had feared that
when middle age overtook me I should feel middle-aged and full of sad
longings for the old toys and the old pleasures. How would life be
tolerable when cricket, for example, had ceased to play an important part
in it? Never again to have the ecstasy of a drive along "the carpet" to the
boundary or, with a flash of the arm, snapping an opponent in the slips.
What a dreary desolation life must be, stripped of those joys! And on the
contrary I find that the spirit of youth is no more dependent on cricket
than it is on the taste for lollipops. It consists in the contented
acceptance of the things that are possible to us. Do not suppose, young
fellow, that you are any younger than I am because you can jump five feet
eight and I have ceased to want to jump at all.
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