Don’t you know elderly people who make learned notes in Army Lists, Peerages, and the like?  This is the batter-pudding, water-gruel of old age.  The worn-out old digestion does not care for stronger food.  Formerly it could swallow twelve-hours’ tough reading, and digest an encyclopaedia.

If I had children to educate, I would, at ten or twelve years of age, have a professor, or professoress, of whist for them, and cause them to be well grounded in that great and useful game.  You cannot learn it well when you are old, any more than you can learn dancing or billiards.  In our house at home we youngsters did not play whist because we were dear obedient children, and the elders said playing at cards was “a waste of time.”  A waste of time, my good people!  Allons!  What do elderly home-keeping people do of a night after dinner?  Darby gets his newspaper; my dear Joan her Missionary Magazine or her volume of Cumming’s Sermons—­and don’t you know what ensues?  Over the arm of Darby’s arm-chair the paper flutters to the ground unheeded, and he performs the trumpet obligato que vous savez on his old nose.  My dear old Joan’s head nods over her sermon (awakening though the doctrine may be).  Ding, ding, ding:  can that be ten o’clock?  It is time to send the servants to bed, my dear—­and to bed master and mistress go too.  But they have not wasted their time playing at cards.  Oh, no!  I belong to a Club where there is whist of a night, and not a little amusing is it to hear Brown speak of Thompson’s play, and vice versa.  But there is one man—­Greatorex let us call him—­who is the acknowledged captain and primus of all the whist-players.  We all secretly admire him.  I, for my part, watch him in private life, hearken to what he says, note what he orders for dinner, and have that feeling of awe for him that I used to have as a boy for the cock of the school.  Not play at whist?  “Quelle triste vieillesse vous vous preparez!” were the words of the great and good Bishop of Autun.  I can’t.  It is too late now.  Too late! too late!  Ah! humiliating confession!  That joy might have been clutched, but the life-stream has swept us by it—­the swift life-stream rushing to the nearing sea.  Too late! too late!  Twentystone my boy! when you read in the papers “Valse a deux temps,” and all the fashionable dances taught to adults by “Miss Lightfoots,” don’t you feel that you would like to go in and learn?  Ah, it is too late!  You have passed the choreas, Master Twentystone, and the young people are dancing without you.

I don’t believe much of what my Lord Byron the poet says; but when he wrote, “So for a good old gentlemanly vice, I think I shall put up with avarice,” I think his lordship meant what he wrote, and if he practised what he preached, shall not quarrel with him.  As an occupation in declining years, I declare I think saving is useful, amusing, and not unbecoming.  It must be a perpetual amusement.  It is a game that can be played by day, by night,