Harriet E. Paine,[78] a retired maiden teacher, had grown deaf and her sight was dim at sixty, when this book was written. Her attitude is one of the very best illustrations of the consolations that are open to those in whom old age is like a summer night, who can maintain their optimism when the senses cut us off from the external world and we have to “economize the falling river” and take in sail. The author has much to say of old people with defective senses and thinks deafness particularly irritating both to the individual and to those about, especially if, as in her case, there is also weakness and diffidence. These impel one to take refuge in the “Great Comrade.” Like so many others, she finds great satisfaction in the familiar cases of great things done by old people and thinks that “the higher powers of the mind go on ripening to the last,” instancing the remarkable fight made for life by Pope Leo XIII when he was ninety-four, the chief items in whose enlightened policy were inaugurated after he was seventy. Samuel Whittemore, at eighty, killed three British soldiers on April 19, 1775, and then was himself shot, bayoneted, and beaten seemingly to death but had vitality enough to live on to the age of ninety-eight. Sophocles wrote his _Œdipus_ at ninety; Mrs. Gilbert acted till over seventy; Mrs. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and others furnish examples that hearten her, etc. When the hair grows white it is possible, especially for women, to do many things impossible before.