One is sometimes moved to believe that if the aged are unhappy it is because age brings with it not only opportunity for quiet meditation and serene retrospect, but the necessity of thinking about the great issues of life. And many of us have never learned how to think. We have put off the evil day of taking thought upon life so that, when it at last comes, its imminence appalls. Men and women put off their questions and their problems to the end of life and when the end is nearly come, they lack the strength and will to think them through. The need of solutions is then cruelly pressed upon unpracticed and undisciplined minds. Though I ask the question, how to grow old and how not to grow old, are we not, if we will be frank, more interested in the question how not to grow old than how to grow old? In the question, pressing a little farther, how to seem not to grow old rather than how not grow old? Seeming not to grow old may be attained by artificial means. Not to grow old may be achieved by inward grace alone. Need it be said that no one is ever deceived by external methods of averting age, nor is any one profited or helped save perhaps the chemist and the dye-maker, save the babblers and praters of new substitutes for old faiths? Whosoever thinks of old age aright, whosoever has fitted himself for the dignity of the burden of many days will resort neither to renewing cosmetics nor novel cults as a refuge from old age. Men speak of the penalties of old age and penalties there are, but what of its rewards, rich and abundant and wondrous, richer indeed in most cases than its desert? The old, because they are old, are treated for the most part as if they were travelers returning richly laden with stores of varied treasures from a voyage over remotest seas to some strange and wondrous spot. Old age in itself is no more a reward than a penalty. And yet what rewards, paraphrasing Shakespeare, accompany old age, and how fitting that these rewards, friendship-bearing, honor-bringing, should wait upon what might elsewise be life’s melancholy end! The truth is that old age is not a period of rewards nor penalties in themselves. It is a time of duties, as every period offers life’s cup with duties brimming o’er. Duties there are,—but there are privileges beyond estimate. And the privilege of privileges is to offer an example to others in all ways and most of all in the way of facing life with serenity. Finer far for old age to claim its duties than to enjoy its privileges for the old ought to shun being pitied as weak and seek rather to be admired as strong and honored as serene.