middle-age and from that unconscious insolence of the babbling youth around them, which is, perhaps, most felt by the aged when youth is most loving and considerate. One does not want to be “considered” by a baby. They suffer from a jar between their own impression of their own wisdom, as a necessary product of their long experience, and a secret doubt whether the young, who evidently think so differently, can be all wrong, not to mention that actual disrespect which the peculiar conceit of the young always appears to indicate even when it is not intended. They suffer from their keen memory for disappointments, which sometimes in the reflections of the old exaggerate their bulk till life seems made up of little else—a phenomenon constantly observable in the monologues of the uneducated and ill-restrained. And they suffer most of all from the loss, ever-increasing as time slips along, not only of those dearest to them, but of accustomed intimates, and especially of friends who grow fewer not only from deaths, but from departures, alienations, and changes of condition and feeling. The very old, as far as our experience serves, are fortunate if, outside the circle of blood relations, they retain even one or two close friends: and this to some men and women, especially to those much dependent on conversation to stimulate their natures and “put them in spirits,” is the most irremediable of losses. They feel as if life had altered, and the very sunlight were less inspiring. Add that all the indulgences of hope, including day dreaming, become vapid—reason showing the unreality—and gradually cease, and we may admit that even under favorable circumstances old age is not an enviable condition, more especially among Englishmen and Americans, who feel little of that instinctive reverence for age, and belief in its nearness to the divine, which characterises all Asia and a large portion of Southern Europe. The Teutons think allusions to gray hairs, which Southerners regard as solemn, and will accept even in a theatre with applause, a little rhetorical or artificial. The respect for the old is not gone, but a certain reverence is, if it ever existed among us, which, remembering Shakespeare's lines and our own workhouse arrangements, we half incline to doubt.—_Spectator._