“As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years they are looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates, only a small pittance being reserved for their support, and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period they are held incapable of any employment of trust or privilege, cannot purchase land or take leases; neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause either civil or criminal.” “At ninety they lose their teeth and hair, they have at that age no distinction of taste but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite.” In talking, they forget the common appellation of things and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relatives. “For the same reason they can never amuse themselves with reading because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end. The language of the country, too, is slowly undergoing a change so that the Struldbruggs of one age do not understand those of another but live like foreigners in their own country.” They are despised and hated by all sorts of people. When one of them is born it is reckoned ominous and the birth is recorded very particularly, but in general the record is lost after a thousand years. “They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld, and the women were more horrible than the men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness in proportion to their number of years.” Thus from what the author saw and heard, his keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated and he realized that there was no form of death to which he would not run with pleasure in order to escape such a life. He concludes that it is fortunate that his desire of taking specimens of these people to his own country was forbidden by law, and reflects that their maintenance might prove a grievous public charge, for since “avarice is the necessary consequent of old age, these immortals would, in time, become proprietors of the whole nation and engross the civil power, which a want of abilities to manage must end in the ruin of the public.” CHAPTER III LITERATURE BY AND ON THE AGED Harriet E. Paine--Amelia E. Barr--Mortimer Collins--Col. Nicholas Smith--Byron C. Utecht--J. L. Smith--Sanford Bennett--G. E. D. Diamond--Cardinal Gibbons--John Burroughs--Rollo Ogden--James L. Ludlow--Brander Matthews--Ralph Waldo Emerson--Oliver Wendell Holmes--Senator G. F. Hoar--William Dean Howells--H. D. Sedgwick--Walt Mason--E. P. Powell--U. V. Wilson--D. G. Brinton--N. S. Shaler--Anthony Trollope--Stephen Paget--Richard le Gallienne--G. S. Street--C. W. Saleeby--Bernard Shaw--A few typical poems and quotations.