I am to her taste interesting because I am
experienced. I am richer intellectually than any man could be at an
earlier age. She reads to me, often reads to me:
"Grow old along with me,
The best is yet to be,
The last of life for which the first was made."
How glorious is old age! She comforts me, makes me contented with my
state at times; she makes me forget how I feel when I rise in the
morning, stiff, bewildered, sometimes wondering where I am. She helps me
to establish my mind when it thinks of too many things at once, and
cannot choose for paltering and fumbling. I walk with a cane; but legs
are nothing. The soul is the prize, the flower. My food does not digest
itself well; my heart flutters and stumbles; my eyes refuse to work even
with the best of glasses. The doctor says I have an old man's arteries.
I know when my memory falters that it is due to the brain which has
shrunk, and to the incrusted arteries which do not carry enough blood
cells to the brain to give me memory. Still the best is yet to be, and
this is now it. I think the law of old age will get me eventually just
as the law of the new era caught Douglas and destroyed him.
It is thirty years now since the great Chicago fire swept my fortune
away. I saved one lot out of the wreck. A skyscraper wanted it to
complete its necessary ground space.
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