Of the three muses, solitude, society, and nature, while all have a new if not stronger attraction it is the first that, from our returns, would seem to increase most with age. Deafness, or perhaps impatience with the overactivities of the young, may weaken the social bonds and physical infirmity may limit contact with nature but nearly all our respondents seek and find solace in themselves more than before. We find few old people who, like many younger ones, have a horror of being alone. Several have daily periods of retreat or retirement when they are “at home” only to themselves, perhaps to digest what they have lately read or to adjust with more equanimity to changes within or without. Thus the old generally find resources within themselves that more or less compensate for their growing isolation, although some reproach themselves or others that they find these resources too meager. One old philosopher says in substance that, realizing that he must sometime meet death absolutely alone and reach a point where he must take final leave of all and everything about him, he feels that he must strengthen his soul by practising for the most solitary of all experiences. Thus there is a certain hermit or recluse motive, which of old sent so many aging persons into the desert, wilderness, mountains, etc., a motif that may possibly have received some psychogenetic reinforcement from the dangers of ill-treatment by their fellows to which in cruder stages of life the old were exposed. It is entirely impossible for youth to fully sympathize with age because this would mean nothing less than to anticipate it, and so the aged often feel, deep in their souls, that there is a slight falsetto or conventional note, even in the greatest consideration shown to them. This condition, in morbid cases, may amount to suspicions of insincerity or a sense that kindness masks the opposite feeling. Happily, however, most of the aged do not seem to suffer acutely from this feeling but accept what is done for them at its full face value.