“Then am I revenged indeed! Æsthetic as he is, Dr. Osler will wish that he had taken an anæsthetic before the book reviewers get through with him. Oh, for the fatally facile pen of the bright and bitter Corelli!” “Anthony Trollope says he said it first.” “Oh, the idea is itself old enough to be chloroformed,” explained Dr. Hasbeen. “Osler has been trying to explain that it was all a jest, but the public refuses to take him in earnest: a comedian never can become a tragedian. It only goes to show that, although Barnum may be right in his opinion that the American people like to be fooled, they won’t swallow a joke that is thrust down their throats and smile over it, and they do not want their sense of the ludicrous drugged by an overdose of chloroform.” “I may be a member of the silent majority,” went on Methuselah, “but this insult to age would put speech in the most chapfallen mummy, however it might be pressed for time. Notified to quit thinking at forty and to stop living at sixty! Why, in my day, a man hadn’t cut his wisdom tooth then! I’m inclined to think that Dr. Osler still has some teeth to cut. Man, like wine, improves with age. Before making that speech the doctor should have put on his old slippers; then nobody would have known where the shoe pinched him.” “I wonder how long it took Osler to sober up after that intemperate speech? Nobody ever heard of him until he approached the danger line of encroaching years. What has he been doing in the past? Doubtless he is no different from the ordinary man, who remains a dormant factor until he comes to years of discretion, which is more likely to be sixty than sixteen. Before that time, he courts women and wine more assiduously than wisdom and common sense.” “A man’s early life is too much taken up with breach-of-promise cases, divorces and the stock exchange to care whether or not the world owes him a living or to take the trouble to collect it. Though the financial acumen of Humpty Dumpty does not make Wall Street tremble, it tumbles to a good thing long before he takes a fall to himself. The bears come out of their pits and the bulls leave their greenbacks to seek other and greener goods to devour.” “You know ‘there is no fool like an old fool,’” I ventured to quote. “‘Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools’; they’ve been there themselves,” retorted Methuselah. “It is easy to mould even stubborn facts by applying the sparks from the thought anvils of dead men’s minds, which the world accepts because the men are dead and not because the sparks burn with living truth. “Proverbs, not men, should be sacrificed on the altar of antiquity. “‘At thirty man suspects himself a fool; Knows it at forty and reforms his plan.’”