firm, leaving the one who put in the money with all the experience, and the one who put in the experience with all the money!  The practices of law and medicine are famous for the need of age, which they harness anew with the labors and exertions ordinarily demanded of youth.  “Tell me,” says Shakerly Marmion, “what you find better or more honorable than age.  Is not wisdom entailed upon it?

TAKE THE PRE-EMINENCE OF IT IN EVERYTHING—­

in an old friend, in old wine, in an old pedigree.”  “I venerate old age,” says the great and good poet Longfellow; “and I love not the man who can look without emotion upon the sunset of life, when the dusk of evening begins to gather over the watery eye, and the shadows of twilight grow broader and deeper upon the understanding.”  “It is only necessary to grow old to become more indulgent,” writes Goethe; “I see no fault committed that I have not committed myself.”  “An aged Christian,” says Chapin, beautifully enlarging on Goldsmith’s and Dr. Donne’s ideas, “with the snow of time on his head, may remind us that those points of earth are whitest which are nearest heaven.”

[Illustration:  OLD AGE.

“Age is the outer shore against which dashes an eternity.”  Page 401.]

“LIKE A MORNING DREAM,”

again says Richter, “life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear.  What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.”  “Time has laid his hand upon my heart gently,” says Longfellow, “not smiting it; but

AS A HARPER LAYS HIS OPEN PALM

upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.”  “I think that to have known one good old man,” George William Curtis says, “one man who, through the chances and mischances of a long life, has carried his heart in his hand, like a palm branch, waving all discords into peace—­helps our faith in God, in ourselves, and in each other more than many sermons.”  “He that would pass the declining years of his life with honor and comfort,” says Addison, with fine opposition, “should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember, when he is old, that he has once been young.”  On the principle that blessings brighten as they take their flight we come to love the sunshine and the birds and all God’s glorious works just as we grow old.

“IF WE NEVER CARED FOR LITTLE CHILDREN BEFORE”

says Lord Lytton, “we delight to see them roll on the grass over which we hobble.  The grandsire turns wearily from his middle-aged, care-worn son, to listen with infant laugh to the prattle of an infant grandchild.  It is the old who plant young trees; it is the old who are most saddened by the autumn, and feel most delight in the returning spring.”  “Winter,” says Richter, “which strips the leaves from around us, makes us see the distant regions they formerly concealed; so does old age rob us of our enjoyments, only to enlarge the prospect of eternity before us.”  Seneca says that there is nothing more disgraceful than that an old man should have nothing to produce as a proof that he has lived long except his years.  I love Longfellow’s picture of