What kind of audience or reading parish is a man who secured his constituency in middle life, or before that period, to expect when he has reached the age of threescore and twenty? His coevals have dropped away by scores and tens, and he sees only a few units scattered about here and there, like the few beads above the water after a ship has gone to pieces. Does he write and publish for those of his own time of life? He need not print a large edition. Does he hope to secure a hearing from those who have come into the reading world since his coevals? They have found fresher fields and greener pastures. Their interests are in the out-door, active world. Some of them are circumnavigating the planet while he is hitching his rocking chair about his hearth-rug. Some are gazing upon the pyramids while he is staring at his andirons. Some are settling the tariff and fixing the laws of suffrage and taxation while he is dozing over the weather bulletin, and going to sleep over the obituaries in his morning or evening paper. Nature is wiser than we give her credit for being; never wiser than in her dealings with the old. She has no idea of mortifying them by sudden and wholly unexpected failure of the chief servants of consciousness. The sight, for instance, begins to lose something of its perfection long before its deficiency calls the owner's special attention to it. Very probably, the first hint we have of the change is that a friend makes the pleasing remark that we are “playing the trombone,” as he calls it; that is, moving a book we are holding backward and forward, to get the right focal distance. Or it may be we find fault with the lamp or the gas-burner for not giving so much light as it used to. At last, somewhere between forty and fifty, we begin to dangle a jaunty pair of eye-glasses, half plaything and half necessity. In due time a pair of sober, business-like spectacles bestrides the nose. Old age leaps upon it as his saddle, and rides triumphant, unchallenged, until the darkness comes which no glasses can penetrate. Nature is pitiless in carrying out the universal sentence, but very pitiful in her mode of dealing with the condemned on his way to the final scene. The man who is to be hanged always has a good breakfast provided for him. Do not think that the old look upon themselves as the helpless, hopeless, forlorn creatures which they seem to young people. Do these young folks suppose that all vanity dies out of the natures of old men and old women? A dentist of olden time told me that a good-looking young man once said to him, “Keep that incisor presentable, if you can, till I am fifty, and then I sha'n't care how I look.” I venture to say that that gentleman was as particular about his personal appearance and as proud of his good looks at fifty, and many years after fifty, as he was in the twenties, when he made that speech to the dentist.