Our retirement, even if gradual and not dated, calls attention to our age, and to our little world we grow old a decade the day it learns that we have stepped aside while to ourselves we may and ought to feel that we grow young that day by yet more. The springtide of a new stage of life stirs our pulses and we feel something of the care-free happiness of another childhood. Our intimates often remark signs of a new vitality, physical and mental. If we are normal and not too spent, we feel new hopes, ambitions, make plans to surpass our old selves and to at last be, do, say, enjoy something really worth while. As we pass our life in review, stage by stage, up to the present, it seems so incomplete, fragmentary, tentative, and altogether unsatisfying that we almost wonder whether it was we ourselves who really lived it or someone else whose career we are following with an objective detachment never felt before toward our own ego. Certain it is that a new veil falls between us and our past, gauzy and transparent though it be. Our psychic nature did not intend us for the rôle of reminiscence so persistently assigned to and so commonly accepted by us. Our juvenile memories are but the ragbag vestiges of a vaster experience that had to be forgotten to be completely incorporated in our personality and to ascribe too much significance to them is the fetishism of senility. If we write up our lives, we can make them interesting and valuable only by using our better information about and more sympathetic rapport with ourselves with the same impartiality that a close and discerning friend would do if he had all our data. It is for the things of the present and for the problems of the future that our mental vision becomes clearer than ever before. Our wish and will to achieve and make our insights known and prevail acquire new force.