Many persons have what is sometimes called a "diseased" feeling against growing old. They look upon old age as a melancholy necessity.

But since advanced age is as natural as entering into life, why not meet that condition naturally? Why should we borrow trouble or harbor regret concerning the operation of a law of nature? With the approach of the scriptural limit of human life bodily vigor declines. The sight grows dim. The grinders cease because they are few, or are wholly lost. But why should these matters which are inevitable, dispel generous impulses or disturb one's peace of mind? A frost does not hurt hard autumn fruit. It takes the prickly cover off from one, and turns the juices of the other to sugar. Mr. Beecher says he "does not know of anything that is made sour by frost except men. They sometimes are. October, the ripest month of the year, and the richest in colors, is a type of what old age should be."

There is something very beautiful in growing old if life is lived naturally. Old age is a divine condition because Providence has decreed it. Shade trees and forests are never more attractive than when autumnal frosts tinge their leaves with ruddy gold. The most charming pictures of the sun ever painted do not represent the brightness of its rising, nor its luster at resplendent noon, but rather its golden setting.

And so in human life, the sweetest, the tenderest, the divinest picture of motherhood is not seen at the age when she gives the world her first born, but rather when her hair is whitened and her face furrowed with age. It is then that she becomes truly sweet-featured, and her presence in the home a benediction. And we can hardly consider that a man reaches his best estate at forty, or even at fifty. The true test of his manhood, of his power to do things, comes when the years begin to weigh upon him. An unnamed Italian moralist says: "A man grows old most gracefully when his hand still rests lightly, but with the touch of a master, upon the work which has stood to him for his ripest years." It is a great thing to live so that the richest part of life shall be its evening.

The Lord is wonderfully gracious to the children of men. He gives to almost all men and women the capacity to attain old age gracefully. By a happy process of nature some beautiful traits of character are within the reach of those who are aging which may be utilized to much advantage if they are not heedlessly or wilfully repelled. In an elderly person the sympathies are increased. The nature is more kindly and the spirit more forgiving. As a rule, the heart grows warmer. The fountain of bile, which in former years was too often stirred to distress, perhaps by an impetuous temper, is dried up. Age has softened his asperities. Many times "the aged have been seen to linger so rich in disposition, and so bright, and beautiful, as to make youth seem poor in treasure when compared with old age."

Of the softening effects of age there is an excellent illustration in Shakespeare. He wrote "The Tempest," calm and beautiful, shortly before he died on his fifty-third birthday, in 1616; "the wisest of dramas thus springing from the brain which had followed the master love play with the unrivalled tragedies of stormy intellect."

Mr. Norman Hapgood, to whom the foregoing quotation belongs, once said in The Atlantic Monthly, that a friend of his, designing for a golden wedding, carved three compassionate women, "Spring, Summer, Autumn - there was no fourth." The artist was wise. We live in the heart, and if incompassionate Winter should knock at its door, keep him out! Holmes, in Over the Teacups, gives an account of the last annual dinner of six of the ten survivors of his college class of 1829. Six old men in place of thirty or forty who surrounded the long oval table in 1859, when he asked - "Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?" "Boys," he adds, "whose tongues were as the vibrating leaves of the forest; whose talk was like the voice of many waters; whose laugh was as the breaking of mighty waves upon the seashore." "Were we melancholy?" asked Dr. Holmes. "Did we talk of graveyards and epitaphs? No. We were not the moping, complaining grayheads that many might suppose we must have been. We had been favored with the blessing of long life. We had seen the drama well into its fifth act. The sun still warmed us, the air was still grateful and life-giving. But there was another underlying source of our cheerful equanimity which we could not conceal from ourselves if we had wished to do it. Nature's kindly anodyne was telling upon us more and more with every year."

When Holmes died in 1894 - some five years after the class meeting just referred to - The London Spectator remarked that it would await his autobiography with lively curiosity, for it wanted to know if he was ever unhappy. His autobiography never appeared because he never wrote one. It is known, however, that Oliver Wendell Holmes was never in an unhappy mood. He trained himself to grow old so gracefully that in every circumstance of his life he was joyously optimistic. The whole purpose of his living was to make the world better. Whether in essay, or novel, or speech, or poem, he was ever the same genial, buoyant-spirited Holmes.

Another gathering of "modem Methuselahs," similar to that described by Holmes, which teaches a valuable lesson as to the cultivation of cheerfulness in old age, was a banquet given at the Essex Club, in Park Place, Newark, New Jersey, in May, 1894. Such an assembly has not often been known in this country. The dinner was given by Silas Halsey, of Newark, for Judge Joseph Alexander, of South Orange, New Jersey. There were nineteen guests. The youngest man was seventy; eight were not far short of the span of four score years; six were octogenarians; one was ninety, the guest of the evening was ninety-two, another was ninety-three, and the senior, one of the jolliest of the lot, was ninety-five.