Amelia E. Barr[79] says that on March 29, 1911, she awoke early to see her eightieth birthday come in. “I wish to master in these years the fine art of dying well, which is quite as great a lesson as the fine art of living well, about which everyone is so busy.” A good old age is a neighbor to a blessed eternity. An English physician said, “If you wish to have a vigorous old age, go into the darkness and silence ten hours out of every twenty-four, for in darkness we were formed.” “Never allow anyone to impose their pleasures upon you; if you have any rights, it is to choose the way you will spend your time.” “On the margin gray, twixt night and day,” the author finds special comfort in the lines There is no death. What seems so is transition. This life or mortal breath is but the suburb of the life elysian Whose portal we call death. It is a sin, she says, to become so mentally active that we are unable to keep quiet and go to sleep. The Greeks knew little of insomnia and the English have been great sleepers and dreamers, holding perhaps with Wordsworth that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” etc. This author is an astrologist and tells us that nine insane rulers were born when Mercury or the moon, or both, were affected by Mars, Saturn, or Uranus, and five people of genius were ruled by the same planets and became insane. She really mourns less for what age takes away than what it leaves behind. The tone of her work differs radically from that of Miss Paine. The latter seeks and finds compensations so satisfactory to herself that she ventures into print with them, apparently for the first time, hoping that she may thereby help others to live out their old age better; while the former indulges her literary instincts to produce another book and is far more inspired by the muse of Death than that of Life. The kismet motive, which is expressed in her recourse to astral fatalism, manifests not a _pis aller_ resource first found when she was old but one that had long been with her, and it is an interesting recrudescence of the same psychological motivations that in the East made fatalism and among Calvinists made the doctrine of divine decrees and foreordination so attractive. At the age of eighty-three she worked six hours a day instead of nine as formerly, avoided routine, tried to give her mind new thoughts, and thought this mental diet kept her strong. She took two cups of coffee in the morning and more at night, persisted in lying abed ten hours although she slept but seven, eschewed all preserved fruits, etc. She had a constant sense of the Divine and her whole standpoint is very different from that, for example, of Burroughs.