Rambling old man that I am! It is time my chapters came to an end. Alice is horrified at my reading out of Homer a passage in the twentieth book of the Odyssey, and says she shall dream of it. I defy Pfeffers to find any thing more ghastly in German story. It is where the guests are suddenly struck mad. They burst forth into sardonic laughter. Blood issues from their mouths, and tears pour from their eyes. Meanwhile Theoclymenus, gifted with sudden clairvoyance, beholds the sun perishing from the heavens, the porch filled with spectres, and the walls sweating gore. Why has it not been quoted by our Northern spiritualists? * * * * * Before I end my dictations and resolve to bid Alice close her portfolio, let me give one or two discoveries concerning old age, which my readers will better understand when they have had the “three warnings.” Old folks do not acquire wisdom in a natural way; that is, as they acquire short breath, puckered lips, gray hairs, crowsfeet, weak knees and shuffling feet. Habit is habit. Idle youth—idle age. I love books as much and as fondly as when I was in my father’s garret. But my glasses are too young for me, and McAlister is five hundred miles away, and folios are hard to manage, and my grand-daughter is in peril of laryngitis by reading so loud to me, and my eyes close in the middle of periods, and my pipe goes out ten times a-day. When I was young I thought life pleasant, but I also thought that after three-score I should be ready to yield it without a sigh. I do not know how it is, but my love of life has a tenacity as tough as my corded fingers. Every preparation for “that vast ocean I must sail so soon” is induced _ab extra_. The instinctive tendency is to live a little longer. In old age I fancy myself not very much attended to. This I suppress; but for the life of me I cannot help observing that in all companies my chair becomes insular. The young men prefer learning of the young women. The young women attend to me sweetly—but as it were by afterthought, from sense of duty. As an old man, I perceive that young creatures are too gay. The loud laugh reaches me, but I have lost the _bon mot_ which caused it. The books they are in raptures about are not in my collection. Was I ever thus? And did those grave looks of my seniors proceed from something like this in their heedless offspring? Heigh-ho! It is time for me to look for hat and stick, as a _conviva satur_.