The paragraph came to us like a blow in the face. For years and years we had been going along buoyed up by the comments of readers who wrote in from time to time to say: "Of course, you are still a young man. You will learn better as you grow older." And now we find that we have grown older. We have reached a comparatively advanced age, and the problem of whether or not we have learned better is present and persistent. It can no longer be put off as something which will work out all right in time. "Some day," says the young man to himself, "I'm going to sit down and write a novel, or the great American drama, or an epic poem." Then some day comes and the young man finds that his joints are stiff and he can't sit down. However, we are not quite prepared to admit that thirty-two is the deadline. It seemed old age to us for a long time. When we were reporting baseball the players used to call Roy Hartzell, over on third base, "the old man," because he was all of twenty-nine, and veterans of thirty were constantly dropping out because of advancing age and the pressure of recruits of nineteen and twenty. Yes, thirty-two was a comparatively advanced age at that time. But then we got on to plays and books, and Bernard Shaw was doing all the timely hitting in the pinches, and, to mix the metaphor, breaking loose and running the length of the field, putting a straight arm into the faces of all who would tackle him. De Morgan started to blaze at the age of fifty, and James Huneker was the keenest of all the critics to hail anything in any art which was new and hitherto unclassified. And he, too, wrote his first novel, _Painted Veils_, long after fifty. It was a novel which we did not like very much, but all its faults were those of youth. Some of it actually sophomoric. It was more like the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald than any living author. We felt that it was a first novel by a "promising" man, and thirty and twenty-nine and all those ages seemed to us mere verdant days in the hatchery. We remember a sweet girl reporter going to Major General Sibert, commander of the First Division in its early days in France, and asking: "General, don't you think this is a young man's war?" Sibert grinned behind his gray mustache, and said: "When I was in West Point I used to bear in mind that Napoleon won some of his greatest victories while he was in his thirties, but now I find my attention turning more and more to the fact that Hindenburg is seventy-two and Joffre is seventy." Time, we know, is fleeting, but there is always a little more left for the man who can look senility and destruction and all that sort of business straight in the eye and remark calmly, "I'm too busy this afternoon; drop around to-morrow." Thirty-two isn't a comparatively advanced age. Some day we are going to write that epic poem, and the novel, and the great American drama.