However, you settle down to an old man’s pleasures. You dislike being hustled after dinner. You prefer a quiet rubber at Bridge in a cosy room, with shaded lights, and a silent cigar with cronies of a choice, familiar brand as playmates. You prefer it to strenuously dancing in a stuffy, glaring ball-room till morning hours chase the stale and weary dancers to their homes. It is too fatiguing an amusement to make pleasure for you, as there is no new romance to be looked for after fifty. Anticipation at your ripe age is wasted stimulant. Boys dream of the future, old men live in the present. Youth, once upon a time, was an asset held in hand, a rich inheritance to be proud of, but now the treasury of youth is spent to the last coin and only the empty coffer remains, a memento of the vanished wealth of early days. You are a middle-aged man aged fifty, and you settle down to it solidly and squarely and comfortably. You will never be young and flippant again this side the harbour-bar. As we steer cautiously into the sixties and face the grand climacteric, life grows pensive. Sober reflections automatically cast their lengthening shadows over us. We have drunk copiously of the wine of life, and are now coming to the dregs of the bottle. We get moody. Meridian sunshine has not fructified the promise of youth as we appointed it. Lean years have eaten up years of plenty. We have gathered tares with the wheat which brought disappointment into the storehouse. Varied experiences have chequered life with cross lights and shadows. The grand ideals of sanguine youth have dissolved like dreams at daybreak, and instead of the great achievement ours is the common lot. Rates and taxes are hardy annuals that flourish undisturbed amidst the ruins. Are we downhearted because the romance of life has fizzled out like spent fireworks and left us in darkness? We did not expect to finish up in obscurity. Are we downhearted? No; after the struggle and stress of conflict we get our second breath; and the calm of age overtakes us. The halcyon hours set in to cheer us. I now move airily along the line of least resistance, and this brings tranquillity of mind in my advancing years. We are no longer broody. Experience breaks one in gently to the monotony of daily routine, and the collar neither frets nor rubs the shoulder, for the velvet lining of contentment softens the friction and we trudge along serenely going West.