[This particular record is noteworthy principally for containing a paper
by my friend, the Professor, with a poem or two annexed or intercalated.
I would suggest to young persons that they should pass over it for the
present, and read, instead of it, that story about the young man who was
in love with the young lady, and in great trouble for something like nine
pages, but happily married on the tenth page or thereabouts, which, I
take it for granted, will be contained in the periodical where this is
found, unless it differ from all other publications of the kind.
Perhaps, if such young people will lay the number aside, and take it up
ten years, or a little more, from the present time, they may find
something in it for their advantage. They can’t possibly understand it
all now.]

My friend, the Professor, began talking with me one day in a dreary sort
of way. I couldn’t get at the difficulty for a good while, but at last
it turned out that somebody had been calling him an old man.—He didn’t
mind his students calling him the old man, he said. That was a
technical expression, and he thought that he remembered hearing it
applied to himself when he was about twenty-five. It may be considered
as a familiar and sometimes endearing appellation. An Irishwoman calls
her husband “the old man,” and he returns the caressing expression by
speaking of her as “the old woman.” But now, said he, just suppose a
case like one of these. A young stranger is overheard talking of you as
a very nice old gentleman. A friendly and genial critic speaks of your
green old age as illustrating the truth of some axiom you had uttered
with reference to that period of life. What I call an old man is a
person with a smooth, shining crown and a fringe of scattered white
hairs, seen in the streets on sunshiny days, stooping as he walks,
bearing a cane, moving cautiously and slowly; telling old stories,
smiling at present follies, living in a narrow world of dry habits; one
that remains waking when others have dropped asleep, and keeps a little
night-lamp-flame of life burning year after year, if the lamp is not
upset, and there is only a careful hand held round it to prevent the
puffs of wind from blowing the flame out. That’s what I call an old man.

Now, said the Professor, you don’t mean to tell me that I have got to
that yet? Why, bless you, I am several years short of the time when—[I
knew what was coming, and could hardly keep from laughing; twenty years
ago he used to quote it as one of those absurd speeches men of genius
will make, and now he is going to argue from it]—several years short of
the time when Balzac says that men are—most—you know—dangerous to—the
hearts of—in short, most to be dreaded by duennas that have charge of
susceptible females.—What age is that? said I, statistically.—Fifty-two
years, answered the Professor.—Balzac ought to know, said I, if it is
true that Goethe said of him that each of his stories must have been dug
out of a woman’s heart. But fifty-two is a high figure.

Stand in the light of the window, Professor, said I.—The Professor took
up the desired position.—You have white hairs, I said.—Had ’em any time
these twenty years, said the Professor.—And the crow’s-foot,—pes
anserinus, rather.—The Professor smiled, as I wanted him to, and the
folds radiated like the ridges of a half-opened fan, from the outer
corner of the eyes to the temples.—And the calipers said I.—What are the
calipers? he asked, curiously.—Why, the parenthesis, said
I.—Parenthesis? said the Professor; what’s that?—Why, look in the glass
when you are disposed to laugh, and see if your mouth isn’t framed in a
couple of crescent lines,—so, my boy ( ).—It’s all nonsense, said the
Professor; just look at my biceps;—and he began pulling off his coat to
show me his arm. Be careful, said I; you can’t bear exposure to the air,
at your time of life, as you could once.—I will box with you, said the
Professor, row with you, walk with you, ride with you, swim with you, or
sit at table with you, for fifty dollars a side.—Pluck survives stamina,
I answered.

The Professor went off a little out of humor. A few weeks afterwards he
came in, looking very good-natured, and brought me a paper, which I have
here, and from which I shall read you some portions, if you don’t object.
He had been thinking the matter over, he said,—had read Cicero “De
Senectute,” and made up his mind to meet old age half way. These were
some of his reflections that he had written down; so here you have.

THE PROFESSOR’S PAPER.

There is no doubt when old age begins. The human body is a furnace which
keeps in blast three-score years and ten, more or less. It burns about
three hundred pounds of carbon a year, (besides other fuel,) when in fair
working order, according to a great chemist’s estimate. When the fire
slackens, life declines; when it goes out, we are dead.

It has been shown by some noted French experimenters, that the amount of
combustion increases up to about the thirtieth year, remains stationary
to about forty-five, and then diminishes. This last is the point where
old age starts from. The great fact of physical life is the perpetual
commerce with the elements, and the fire is the measure of it.

About this time of life, if food is plenty where you live,—for that, you
know, regulates matrimony,—you may be expecting to find yourself a
grandfather some fine morning; a kind of domestic felicity that gives one
a cool shiver of delight to think of, as among the not remotely possible
events.

I don’t mind much those slipshod lines Dr. Johnson wrote to Thrale,
telling her about life’s declining from thirty-five; the furnace is in
full blast for ten years longer, as I have said. The Romans came very
near the mark; their age of enlistment reached from seventeen to
forty-six years.

What is the use of fighting against the seasons, or the tides, or the
movements of the planetary bodies, or this ebb in the wave of life that
flows through us? We are old fellows from the moment the fire begins to
go out. Let us always behave like gentlemen when we are introduced to
new acquaintance.

Incipit Allegoria Senectutis.

Old Age, this is Mr. Professor; Mr. Professor, this is Old Age.

Old Age.—Mr. Professor, I hope to see you well. I have known you for
some time, though I think you did not know me. Shall we walk down the
street together?

Professor (drawing back a little).—We can talk more quietly, perhaps,
in my study. Will you tell me how it is you seem to be acquainted with
everybody you are introduced to, though he evidently considers you an
entire stranger?

Old Age.—I make it a rule never to force myself upon a person’s
recognition until I have known him at least five years.

Professor.—Do you mean to say that you have known me so long as that?

Old Age. I do. I left my card on you longer ago than that, but I am
afraid you never read it; yet I see you have it with you.

Professor.—Where?

Old Age.—There, between your eyebrows,—three straight lines running up
and down; all the probate courts know that token,—“Old Age, his mark.”
Put your forefinger on the inner end of one eyebrow, and your middle
finger on the inner end of the other eyebrow; now separate the fingers,
and you will smooth out my sign-manual; that’s the way you used to look
before I left my card on you.

Professor.—What message do people generally send back when you first
call on them?

Old Age.—Not at home. Then I leave a card and go. Next year I call;
get the same answer; leave another card. So for five or six,—sometimes
ten years or more. At last, if they don’t let me in, I break in through
the front door or the windows.

We talked together in this way some time. Then Old Age said again,—Come,
let us walk down the street together,—and offered me a cane, an eyeglass,
a tippet, and a pair of over-shoes.—No, much obliged to you, said I. I
don’t want those things, and I had a little rather talk with you here,
privately, in my study. So I dressed myself up in a jaunty way and
walked out alone;—got a fall, caught a cold, was laid up with a lumbago,
and had time to think over this whole matter.

Explicit Allegoria Senectutis.

We have settled when old age begins. Like all Nature’s processes, it is
gentle and gradual in its approaches, strewed with illusions, and all its
little griefs soothed by natural sedatives. But the iron hand is not
less irresistible because it wears the velvet glove. The button-wood
throws off its bark in large flakes, which one may find lying at its
foot, pushed out, and at last pushed off, by that tranquil movement from
beneath, which is too slow to be seen, but too powerful to be arrested.
One finds them always, but one rarely sees them fall. So it is our youth
drops from us,—scales off, sapless and lifeless, and lays bare the tender
and immature fresh growth of old age. Looked at collectively, the
changes of old age appear as a series of personal insults and
indignities, terminating at last in death, which Sir Thomas Browne has
called “the very disgrace and ignominy of our nature.”

My lady’s cheek can boast no more
The cranberry white and pink it wore;
And where her shining locks divide,
The parting line is all too wide—

No, no,—this will never do. Talk about men, if you will, but spare the
poor women.

We have a brief description of seven stages of life by a remarkably good
observer. It is very presumptuous to attempt to add to it, yet I have
been struck with the fact that life admits of a natural analysis into no
less than fifteen distinct periods. Taking the five primary divisions,
infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old age, each of these has its own
three periods of immaturity, complete development, and decline. I
recognize on old baby at once,—with its “pipe and mug,” (a stick of
candy and a porringer,)—so does everybody; and an old child shedding its
milk-teeth is only a little prototype of the old man shedding his
permanent ones. Fifty or thereabouts is only the childhood, as it were,
of old age; the graybeard youngster must be weaned from his late suppers
now. So you will see that you have to make fifteen stages at any rate,
and that it would not be hard to make twenty-five; five primary, each
with five secondary divisions.

The infancy and childhood of commencing old age have the same ingenuous
simplicity and delightful unconsciousness about them as the first stage
of the earlier periods of life shows. The great delusion of mankind is
in supposing that to be individual and exceptional which is universal and
according to law. A person is always startled when he hears himself
seriously called an old man for the first time.

Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, as sailors are hurried on board
of vessels,—in a state of intoxication. We are hustled into maturity
reeling with our passions and imaginations, and we have drifted far away
from port before we awake out of our illusions. But to carry us out of
maturity into old age, without our knowing where we are going, she drugs
us with strong opiates, and so we stagger along with wide open eyes that
see nothing until snow enough has fallen on our heads to rouse our
comatose brains out of their stupid trances.

There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the physical
ones;—I mean the formation of Habits. An old man who shrinks into
himself falls into ways that become as positive and as much beyond the
reach of outside influences as if they were governed by clock-work. The
animal functions, as the physiologists call them, in distinction from
the organic, tend, in the process of deterioration to which age and
neglect united gradually lead them, to assume the periodical or
rhythmical type of movement. Every man’s heart (this organ belongs,
you know, to the organic system) has a regular mode of action; but I know
a great many men whose brains, and all their voluntary existence
flowing from their brains, have a systole and diastole as regular as
that of the heart itself. Habit is the approximation of the animal
system to the organic. It is a confession of failure in the highest
function of being, which involves a perpetual self-determination, in full
view of all existing circumstances. But habit, you see, is an action in
present circumstances from past motives. It is substituting a vis a
tergo for the evolution of living force.

When a man, instead of burning up three hundred pounds of carbon a year,
has got down to two hundred and fifty, it is plain enough he must
economize force somewhere. Now habit is a labor-saving invention which
enables a man to get along with less fuel,—that is all; for fuel is
force, you know, just as much in the page I am writing for you as in the
locomotive or the legs that carry it to you. Carbon is the same thing,
whether you call it wood, or coal, or bread and cheese. A reverend
gentleman demurred to this statement,—as if, because combustion is
asserted to be the sine qua non of thought, therefore thought is
alleged to be a purely chemical process. Facts of chemistry are one
thing, I told him, and facts of consciousness another. It can be proved
to him, by a very simple analysis of some of his spare elements, that
every Sunday, when he does his duty faithfully, he uses up more
phosphorus out of his brain and nerves than on ordinary days. But then
he had his choice whether to do his duty, or to neglect it, and save his
phosphorus and other combustibles.

It follows from all this that the formation of habits ought naturally
to be, as it is, the special characteristic of age. As for the muscular
powers, they pass their maximum long before the time when the true
decline of life begins, if we may judge by the experience of the ring. A
man is “stale,” I think, in their language, soon after thirty,—often, no
doubt, much earlier, as gentlemen of the pugilistic profession are
exceedingly apt to keep their vital fire burning with the blower up.

—So far without Tully. But in the mean time I have been reading the
treatise, “De Senectute.” It is not long, but a leisurely performance.
The old gentleman was sixty-three years of age when he addressed it to
his friend T. Pomponius Atticus, Eq., a person of distinction, some two
or three years older. We read it when we are schoolboys, forget all
about it for thirty years, and then take it up again by a natural
instinct,—provided always that we read Latin as we drink water, without
stopping to taste it, as all of us who ever learned it at school or
college ought to do.

Cato is the chief speaker in the dialogue. A good deal of it is what
would be called in vulgar phrase “slow.” It unpacks and unfolds
incidental illustrations which a modern writer would look at the back of,
and toss each to its pigeon-hole. I think ancient classics and ancient
people are alike in the tendency to this kind of expansion.

An old doctor came to me once (this is literal fact) with some
contrivance or other for people with broken kneepans. As the patient
would be confined for a good while, he might find it dull work to sit
with his hands in his lap. Reading, the ingenious inventor suggested,
would be an agreeable mode of passing the time. He mentioned, in his
written account of his contrivance, various works that might amuse the
weary hour. I remember only three,—Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and Watts on
the Mind.

It is not generally understood that Cicero’s essay was delivered as a
lyceum lecture, (concio popularis,) at the Temple of Mercury. The
journals (papyri) of the day (“Tempora Quotidiana,”—“Tribuinus
Quirinalis,”—“Præco Romanus,” and the rest) gave abstracts of it, one of
which I have translated and modernized, as being a substitute for the