Perhaps I should try out all these suggestions in turn and seek to find by experiment which is really best for me. I almost have the will to do so because I certainly illustrate the old principle that as life advances we love it not less but more, for the habit of living grows so strong with years that it is ever harder to break it. All things considered, however, it would rather seem that the longer we live the harder it is to keep on doing so, and that with every year of life we must give more attention to regimen if we would put off the great life-queller, which all the world fears and hates as it does nothing else, beyond its normal term, which most generally agree is very largely hereditary. In fact, as Minot shows, all creatures begin to die at the very moment when they begin to live. All theories of euthanasia ignore the fact that death is essentially a negation of the will-to-live, so that a conscious and positive will-to-die is always only an artifact. So much I gathered from the doctors I saw or read. Their books and counsels cost me a tidy sum but it was well worth it. I now know myself better than they, and it is much to realize that henceforth an ever-increasing attention must be given to body-keeping if one would stay “fit” or even alive. Now that the average length of human life is increased and there are more and more old people, a fact that marks the triumph of science and civilization, there is more need of studying them, just as in recent decades children have been studied, for medically, at least after the climacteric, they constitute a class in the community that is somewhat alien, its intrinsic nature but little known, and the services it was meant to render but little utilized.[1] As my horizon changed and I became more at home with myself, and personal problems grew nearer and clearer, I realized that I must make a new plan of life, in which both tasks and also a program of renunciation played a very prominent initial part. This began with a literal house-cleaning. My home, from attic to cellar, and even the large barn were more or less full of disused articles of every kind--furniture and even wearing apparel, still serviceable but displaced by better ones, which it was now plain could never be of use to us but might be so to others. About some of these so many old associations clustered that it was a pang to part with them, but it was selfish to keep them longer. And so, by distribution to persons and institutions, then by sales, and finally by dumpage, they were rigorously gotten rid of, room by room, and we all felt relieved physically, mentally, and morally, by this expropriation, even though a few heirlooms were sacrificed. This process has many analogies with those by which the body is rid of waste material.