But I thank whatever gods there are that all this painful renunciation has its very satisfying compensations and that there are other counsels than those of despair, seeing which I can take heart again, and that these are so satisfying that I do not need to have recourse to wood-sawing, like the Kaiser, though I have a new sympathy even for him. My very first and hardest duty of all is to realize that I am really and truly old. Associated for so many years with young men and able to keep pace with them in my own line of work, carrying without scathe not a few extra burdens at times, and especially during the war, and having, varied as my duties were, fallen into a certain weekly and monthly routine that varied little from year to year, I had not realized that age was, all the while, creeping upon me. But now that I am out the full realization that I have reached and passed the scripturally allotted span of years comes upon me almost with a shock. Emerson says that a task is a life-preserver, and now that mine is gone I must swim or go under. To be sure, I had been conscious during half a decade of certain slight incipient infirmities and had had moments of idealizing the leisure which retirement would bring. But when it came I was so overwhelmed and almost distracted by its completeness that I was at a loss, for a time, to know how to use it. I might travel, especially in the Orient, as I had long wanted to do, for I feel that I have a certain right to a “good time” for myself since my life has been a very industrious one and almost entirely in the service of others. I might live much out-of-doors on my small farm; read for pleasure, for I have literary tastes; move to a large city and take in its amusements, of which I am fond; devote myself more to my family, whom I now feel I have rather neglected; or give more time to certain avocations and interests in which I have dabbled but have never had time to cultivate save in the crudest way. Or, finally, I could do a little of all or several of these things in turn. But no program that I can construct out of such possibilities seems entirely satisfactory. I surely may indulge myself a little more in many ways but I really want and ought to do something useful and with a unitary purpose. Thus, I might have spent much time as _Senex quærans institutum vitæ_ but for the saving fact that there are certain very specific things which for years I have longed to do, and indeed have already well begun, and to which, with this new leisure, I can now devote myself as never before.