If your life was sold for gold, your evening of life will be short and miserable; legatees will grudge you your every breath; they will endure you simply because they are checking off the days from Time's calendar until the day of your passing, and the dollars you sold your soul and heart and life for, will be lavishly spent by cold-blooded heirs who cared nothing for you. Leave a legacy of love, example and character, and if, with these, there are a few dollars, they simply prove your frugality, economy and independence. A few dollars left to heirs will help. Many dollars will hurt. Dollars in old age will give you pleasure by helping in tight corners. They will enable you to help your loved ones over the bumps in the road. Use the dollars to help those you love to help themselves, and your old age will be a busy, happy one, and you won't be in the way. To prepare for that happy period of your life, the foundation must be built in the active to-day period. Carry smiles into your old age; they will keep the heart young, the digestion good, and life will be worth while. 53. I have traveled horseback over the great arid plains of the West, and have read the story of the ages gone before. [Sidenote: The Remote Past.] In Arizona and New Mexico there are ancient ruins of forts and cities built by people we know not of. Chalcedony Park with its petrified forest of mammoth trees silently testifies to a period when vegetation was rampant on what is now a desert. In Wyoming there is coal enough to furnish fuel for the United States for several centuries. Coal is carbon made from decayed trees and vegetation, which became covered with earth and rock, and was subjected to tremendous pressure throughout the thousands of years required to effect the transformation. Oceans and floods gradually covered millions of acres of trees and plants with ooze and soil and sand. Ages turned some of these deposits to stone. There in bleak Wyoming is testimony and evidence of changes that time only can bring about. "A thousand years is as a day and a day is as a thousand years." Thus wrote the scribe of old. So, then, we must consider this estimate of time in reading the first chapter of Genesis which describes the order of the world's creation. First took place the dividing of light from darkness, thus bringing about the rotation of day and night. Then, the separating of land and water; then, the birth of vegetation on the land, the creation of fish and reptiles in the sea, the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field, and finally, the higher animal, man. [Sidenote: The Measure of Time.] The pages of the earth's surface carry in their stratification indelible records harmonizing with this scriptural account of the evolution of the earth from its chaotic misty past to its concrete definite present. Yes, this earth of ours is old, so old that mere man cannot contemplate or accurately estimate its wondrous age.