“I feel myself weighed down by a sense of the sins of my ancestors.” My mother, who was the next speaker, sprang to her feet with the retort: “And I feel myself lifted up on the virtues of mine!” There rang out the key-note of her life, the “Everlasting Yea,” the trumpet-tone to which all high souls rally. Many people have had fine wet-nurses; a legion have the same legacy of power in their blood, who do not accomplish much with it. _Poeta nascitur, non fit!_ She was of course born an uncommon person, but I believe the manner and habits of her life, quite as much as her native power, made for her vigorous old age. As I look back on the intimate compan companionship of a lifetime, I realize that these excellent life habits, habits that any one of us can cultivate, had even more to do with her long continued usefulness than the great Irish wet-nurse herself. First, and last, and all the time, she worked, and worked, and worked, steadily as nature works, without rest, without haste. She was never idle, she was never in a hurry. Though she played too, earnestly, enthusiastically, it was never idle play; there was always a dash of poetry in her pastime, whether it was making a charade for the Brain Club, or composing a nursery rhyme for her grandchildren. The capacity for work like everything else grows by cultivation. She started life with a rarely active mind and temperament. So do many people. It was the habit of study, of concentration, of work, carefully cultivated from the first, held on to in spite of difficulties--she had plenty of them--that wrought what seemed to some of her contemporaries a miracle. She could say like Adam in Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It:” “My age is as a lusty winter; Frosty, but kindly: let me go with you; I’ll do the service of a younger man In all your business and necessities.” “Let me go with you!” This is what Age is forever saying to Youth. “Do not leave me behind--I can still serve!” So long as Age makes good the claim, heydey, headlong, good-natured Youth lets the veteran march in its glorious ranks. Youth does not crowd him out, as the veteran too often thinks, he drops out because he “cannot keep the pace!” The reason she did not drop out was because she made good her claim. The children and grandchildren of those with whom she first enlisted, were content to have her march with them, still in the van.