It is delightful to set one's thoughts on the activities and achievements of men of character, force, and power. More particularly is this true of those who are not worried nor hampered because they are in their eighties or nineties. The story of their manner of living stimulates, infuses new hope, inspires, and makes a man of sixty or seventy feel as if the condition, which is called old age is, after all, something to be proud of.

In an issue of the New York World, printed in August, 1904, appeared the following paragraph:

"Almost simultaneously with the event of the nomination of the Hon. Henry G. Davis for the Vice-Presidency, the manager of a large manufacturing plant in New Jersey issued an order removing from the pay rolls of the company all employees who had passed the half-century mark; a judge is retired from the bench who has reached the age limit of seventy years, and an army officer, having become sixty-two years old, is placed on the retired list."

One does not have to look far to find instances to prove that this hard and fast rule of discharging employees, and retiring judges and army officers, is unfortunate. When is a man too old to be of service? Must it be taken for granted that a man of fifty is useless to a manufacturing concern? that a judge at seventy is no longer competent to pass upon a case? that an officer at sixty-two has lost his ability to command? A man's age is not always to be determined by the years he has lived, but rather by his energy and power of mind.

There is a surprisingly large number of octogenarians actively engaged in the various professions. And it is said that only a small percentage of the great corporations of the United States are without a prominent official that is eighty years old or more.

Who are the men whose power is still felt in financial circles in New York City? The ablest and greatest of them are octogenarians. Only a few of them can be named. William A. Smith, a banker, and "father of the Stock Exchange," is a busy man at eighty-four. Samuel Sloan, chairman of the board of directors of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railway, and director in sixteen other railway companies, is eighty-seven. John A. Stewart, chairman of the board of trustees of the United States Trust Company, and a director in a multitude of other financial organizations, is eighty-two. Jacob Daniel T. Hersey, who began to manufacture thread and yam sixty-seven years ago, is now, at the age of eighty-three, an active member of the Chamber of Commerce.

A unique figure, and certainly one of the strongest characters on Wall Street, is Russell Sage. When he reached his eighty-eighth year in 1904, his visits to his Nassau Street office became less frequent than formerly, but he is yet a power in the financial world. He is alert as ever to great public questions; and has a strong hold on the twenty-four large New York corporations in which he is a director.

William H. Mailler, is a shipping merchant of wide fame. For the past sixty years he has been head of the firm of Mailler & Querean in the Australia and New Zealand trade. Mr. Mailler is eighty-one years old, but measured by his capacity for business, he is not more than sixty.

Darius O. Mills, a financier of enormous wealth, is entering his eightieth year. He is a man of many activities. In philanthropic work he is especially distinguished. Between 1895 and 1898 he built two large hotels in New York, at which persons of limited means and of good character, can be served with wholesome and well-cooked meals at from fifteen to thirty cents, and obtain clean and airy lodging rooms at from twenty-five cents to fifty cents a night. Directing personally his many benevolent schemes and his duties as director in eighteen large corporations, he is one of the busiest of the mighty financiers of New York.

The active president of the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company is Henry L. Palmer of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was eighty-five years old in October, 1904, and being perfectly competent to successfully discharge the duties of the office which imposes great responsibilities, the company is not willing that he should retire. Mr. Palmer is one of the most distinguished Free Masons in America. He is the oldest living Past Grand Master, Grand Encampment, Knights Templar of the United States, and now holds the office of Grand Commander of the Supreme Council Northern Jurisdiction of the United States, Scottish Rite Masons.

The story of the bodily strength and mental vigor of William Pinckney Whyte of Baltimore reads like a romance. On August ninth, 1904, he became eighty years old, and was one of the hardest working members of the bar of his city. A correspondent of the New York World says of him: "His eightieth birthday he celebrated by doing some preliminary work at his office, then rushing to Alexandria, Va., where he tried an intricate case, then coming back to his office and seizing a great mass of correspondence, including a great number of congratulatory letters, hurried to the train for his country home, there at his leisure to read them over and prepare for the next day's busy duties."

Mr. Whyte has been Governor of Maryland and United States Senator. But he likes the law better than politics, and to his profession he bends all his energies; and notwithstanding his four-score years he is now to be found on one side or the other of almost every great case, especially in the State courts where corporate interests are involved.

Instances of longevity are chiefly among the abstemious, and Mr. Whyte attributes his robust health to temperate habits.

Sir John Tenniel of London, the self-trained artist, is eighty-four years old. He is famous as a book illustrator, and especially as the cortoonist of Punch. In the art of making cartoons which embody both pathos and humor, his hand has not yet lost its cunning. He keeps himself young by a happy disposition and true gentlemanliness, and still successfully defends his title "as the finest cartoonist who ever put pencil to paper."

Americans contemplate with pride the work of Daniel Huntington, one of our famous artists. He is noted for his fine portraits of Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Agassiz, Bryant, and many others. Among his figure pieces are his exquisite "Mercy's Dream," "Mrs. Washington's Reception," "The Good Samaritan," and "Righteousness and Peace."

Mr. Huntington was eighty-seven years old in October, 1904, was enjoying the rich reward of a life well-lived, and still wielded his brush at his studio in New York.

Eastman Johnson is another busy octogenarian artist to whom Americans pay homage because of his preeminent ability and usefulness in his profession. He has painted the por traits of more of his countrymen than any other artist of his time. The list includes many of the most distinguished public men and women from Alexander Hamilton to Bishop Henry Codman Potter. Medals from all the great expositions of the nineteenth century have been awarded him. And there are many public buildings and galleries in our large cities which his genius has done much to adorn.

Mr. Johnson's old age is blessed with a rare degree of enjoyment. He knows how to live, and to say that truly of any man is a high compliment. Good, red, warm blood still courses through his veins; and at eighty-one he is in no mood to put on canvas a broken palette - a dark picture that Hogarth, at sixty-seven, left behind him as a symbol of old age.

There remain with us many grand old men who are doing conspicuous service in all departments of human endeavor. Chief among those in governmental affairs is King Christian of Denmark, called the "Father-in-Law" of Europe. He is eighty-six years old, but he rules his kingdom with as clear a head and with a sense of justice as thorough as when he ascended the throne in the strength of his splendid manhood, thirty-two years ago.

Intellectual leadership does not always be long to men of middle life. The line for important work cannot be drawn at fifty or even at sixty years. William I. was seventy-four when he commanded the German armies in the Franco-Prussian war. Lord Roberts was sixty-seven when he was made commander-in-chief of the British troops in South Africa, and it was through his leadership that the Boer war closed in favor of the English forces.

After George Dewey left the Naval Academy he waited forty years for an opportunity to make a record for himself, and he was sixty-one before he won his Trafalgar in Manila Bay. Our distinguished Secretary of State, John Hay, had passed his sixty-fourth milestone before he gained the honor of being one of the most brilliant diplomatists of modern times.

A man may have spent more than half his allotted days and yet be able to achieve a greater career than he ever before dreamed of. Chauncey M. Depew says that when Commodore Vanderbilt was seventy years old he was worth about $17,000,000. Even at that age he did not consider himself too old to take up larger business responsibilities. He saw the possibility of railway extension, and beginning with a line only one hundred and twenty miles long, in the following thirteen years he in creased the mileage to 10,000 and added one hundred million dollars to his fortune.

When we hear so much about the thing called the "dead line," whether it be set at forty, or fifty, or sixty, it is pleasant and helpful to study the life of Lord Kelvin. He was born in Belfast, Ireland, eighty-one years ago, and is counted among the foremost scientists of the age.

According to pessimists who fancy that a man is old when he steps over the half-century line, Lord Kelvin is indeed an "old man." But as I am writing these pages, his mental capacity is so great and his attainments so varied and brilliant, that he is not growing out of the work of scientific research, but keeps on working because, to use his own language, "there is nothing else to do." He has every appliance in ventilation and electricity that England and the United States can provide, and it is in his laboratory that one of the master minds of the century works as diligently as when he was in the prime of life.

I want to digress a little and say that when Lord Kelvin was known as Sir William Thomson, he wrote a valuable essay upon the digestive organs of elderly people. His purpose was to suggest a way by which those becoming ad vanced in years could conserve their energies and thereby retain good health. He emphasizes the point that unless care be observed in regulating the diet - reducing the quantity rather than particularizing as to the items of food taken - distressing symptoms will constantly arise. It is much easier to avoid the usual trouble with the digestive organs than to cure it. He holds firmly to the belief that the disappearance of the teeth is a plain indication of the return to second childhood, and therefore the food should be of such a character as may not require the assistance of the teeth to masticate. And he goes so far as to recommend that lost teeth be not replaced by artificial ones lest more food be eaten than the organism can dispose of.

Lord Kelvin is a man of great wisdom in his mode of living; but while his opinion regarding the nonuse of artificial teeth by persons of advanced years cannot be taken literally, the suggestion it offers can hardly fail to be of value to practical men and women.

To carry on life's work bravely and to be serene, patient, and do good during the period of old age is a topic of universal concern. And the cynic and the pessimist are doubtless abashed in the presence of men and women who retain cheerful spirit and constructive powers though they live far beyond the span assigned by the Psalmist.