I am quite well aware that this is not the experience of many others, my wife among the number, on whose nervous system tea acts mischievously, producing inordinate wakefulness, and its continued use, indigestion. But this is one of the things that people should learn, and act upon, namely, to take such things as suit them, and avoid such as do not. It is said that Mithridates could live and flourish on poisons, and if it be true that tea or coffee is a poison, so do most of us. William Hutton, the shrewd and humorous author of the histories of Birmingham and Derby, and also of a life of himself, scarcely inferior to that of Franklin in lessons of life-wisdom, said that he had been told that coffee was a slow poison, and, he added, that he had found it very slow, for he had drunk it more than sixty years without any ill effect My experience of it has been the same. Mr. Bryant also has recourse to the use of dumb-bells, and other gymnastic appliances. For my part, I find no artificial practices necessary for the maintenance of health and a vigorous circulation of the blood. My only gymnastics have been those of Nature--walking, riding, working in field and garden, bathing, swimming, etc. In some of those practices, or in the amount of their use, Nature, in my later years, has dictated an abatement. In Mr. Bryant's abhorrence of tobacco, I fully sympathize. That is a poisoner, a stupefier, a traitor to the nervous system, and, consequently, to energy and the spirit of enterprise, which I renounced once and for ever before I reached my twentieth year. The main causes of the vigor of my constitution and the retention of sound health, comfort, and activity to within three years of eighty, I shall point out as I proceed. First and foremost, it was my good fortune to derive my existence from parents descended on both sides from a vigorous stock, and of great longevity. I remember my great-grandmother, an old lady of nearly ninety; my grandmother of nearly as great an age. My mother lived to eighty-five, and my father to the same age. They were both of them temperate in their habits, living a fresh and healthy country life, and in enjoyment of that tranquillity of mind which is conferred by a spirit of genuine piety, and which confers, in return, health and strength.