Mrs. Hannah W. Truex of Caneadea, New York, has this happy idea of the duty of old age. In October, 1904, she celebrated her ninety-sixth birthday, and on that day had completed a quilt that contains nine hundred and seventy-five pieces; and during the previous year she had pieced six such quilts, which kept her hands and mind busily employed. Her living for a purpose makes Mrs. Truex a perfect type of an aged gentlewoman.

There are many fine examples which sustain the timely suggestion of Julian Hawthorne concerning the resistance of the gravitation of the mind and body. There is a chance for most old men and women to make their last years radiant and useful if they be not chronic victims of the vicious idea that old age is a condition to be dreaded. Complete mastication of wholesome food, exercise, fresh air, cheerful temperament, and good hours, are high-class doctors. They seldom fail to renew one's life and energy. It was only a few months since that the Hon. Preston H. Leslie, in arguing a case before the State Supreme Court of Montana, incidentally made the remark that he was entering upon the sixty-fourth year of his practice as a lawyer. He was then eighty-five years old, and seemed to be as alert and active as many attorneys far younger. In years long gone by he had been governor of Kentucky; he had also been territorial governor of Montana, and finally United States District Attorney. He had mastered the art of warding off the fate that often overtakes men of seventy or eighty years.

Up to the present time the oldest and one of the most reliable lighthouse keepers in the United States is a little, fragile woman of eighty years. Her name is Harriet E. Colfax, a cousin of Schuyler Colfax, at one time

Speaker of the House of Kepresentatives at Washington, and Vice-President during General Grant's first term. For forty-three years this frail, but active-minded and self-reliant woman has kept the harbor light burning at Michigan City, Indiana. Her strength, in a large measure, was limited. But in illness, in winter's storms, in the blackest nights, she never failed to set in place "the blazing guide of two generations of mariners." She loves her work for the good there is in it, and also because it gives her an opportunity to spend much of the day in the open air. In the summer of 1904, Miss Colfax said she was still able to do her work and was loath to give it up; but the Government had concluded to erect a new lighthouse, far out into the lake, which only a strong man can manage, and the great, old-fashioned lamp which she had tended for forty-three years and which had been the hope of many sailors in the terrors of many storms, was soon to go out forever.

There is an old saying that youth, like the kingdom of heaven, is in the heart. This beautiful sentiment is forcibly expressed in the career of the late Mr. John McCoy of Independence, Missouri. His nephew, the Eev. John McCoy of Appleton, Wisconsin, writes me that his uncle was engaged in the business of banking, and lived an ideal life. He not only stayed in the harness, but possessed the happy faculty of keeping himself young as long as he lived. One of the maxims of his life was to forget himself and keep in touch with young people. When Mr. McCoy laid down the cares of life in 1904, at the age of eighty-eight, he had made the incomparable record of superintending the same Presbyterian Sunday School for fifty-six consecutive years.

In Milton's Sonnet to Cyrica Skinner, is this resolution:

"Yet I argue not Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer Right onward."

These lines furnish a text on which many a good sermon could be preached relative to pulling in the harness against physical weakness as well as old age. Herbert Spencer died in December 1903, at the age of eighty-three. Indeed, he was like Paul, "an ambassador in chains," but he stayed in the harness.

Some years before First Principles was published in 1862, Spencer suffered a nervous breakdown. When the attack came he was hardly forty years old. He gradually sank into a condition of practical invalidism. But his courage and purpose failed not. He was no grumbler. He was as much of a philosopher in pain and weakness and advancing years, as he was master of the system of philosophy which made him famous. His business was to work, and he worked! Time and again his physical exhaustion was so weakening that he could dictate only a few brief paragraphs in a day, but after all his achievements were marvellous. Forty years measured his suffering, and during those forty years he built his greatest monuments to his genius.

How one can keep his mental energies on the stretch for full seventy years and yet maintain a physical condition that gives no sign of decay, is seen in the career of Sir Joseph D. Hooker of England, who recently passed his eighty-seventh year. He is probably the greatest living botanist, and some of his most interesting work has been done in Utah, Colorado, California, and the Rockies. By his wisdom and skill in keeping the physical nature on the high plane which has characterized his mentality, Sir Joseph has not been smitten by the frosts of eighty-seven winters.

Perhaps the most remarkable invalid of our time is Bishop Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky (pronounced Sher-e-shev-ske), born of Jewish parentage in Russian Lithuania, in 1831. He was educated in Russia and Germany, and on coming to the United States in 1854, he embraced Christianity, took a course of studies in theology, became an Episcopalian, and received deacon's orders in St. George's Church, New York, in 1859. He went to China in 1860, and was elected by the House of Bishops to the Missionary Episcopate of Shanghai in 1877.

No sooner had Bishop Schereschewsky begun his labors in China than he started his monumental work "which gave to three-quarters of the people of China the Bible in their own spoken language - thus doing for China what Luther did for Germany and King James' version did for the English-speaking race."

In 1883 the Bishop returned to the United States in a paralyzed and almost helpless condition. His friends supposed he was going home to die. But it was at this period that he performed his greatest achievement. Instead of dying, he cautiously, but persistently, gave all the energy his limited physical condition would allow to a revision of the entire Mandarin Bible which had been translated from the original Hebrew and Greek between 1870 and 1881 by a committee in Pekin, under the personal supervision of the Bishop.

During his residence in the United States, which extended from 1883 to 1895, Bishop Schereschewsky began an entirely new translation of the Bible into Wenli, the classical language of China. This almost herculean task was accomplished, says Mr. W. G. Fitz Gerald in Everybody's Magazine, "without any Chinese scribe or assistant, and the whole stupendous script, in Roman letters, was written on a typewriter (made expressly for him), with his two paralyzed front fingers. The Wenli text, which the Bishop humorously calls his twofingered Bible, represents fourteen years of unremitting labor.

"The last time an official of the American Bible Society saw the Bishop in Tokio, he affectionately patted the arms of his chair with the atrophied fingers, and remarked: 'To complete my task I have sat in this chair for over twenty years."

On his return to China in 1895, the Bishop, in collaboration with the Rev. J. S. Burden, translated the Book of Common Prayer into Mandarin. Since 1897 he has resided in Japan, and, spite, of his great infirmities and three-score years and ten, he has compiled a Mongolian dictionary, and at last accounts he was preparing a volume of references to the Mandarin Bible.

Bishop Schereschewsky is not only the most remarkable invalid of this generation, and in every sense the master of his fate, but Professor Max Müller says he is one of the six most learned Orientalists in the world.