I doubt if any of your readers has less sympathy than I with the yearning to go back twenty, thirty, or forty years (as the case may be), which seems to be a note of contemporary literature, and therefore, I take it, of the average mind of the men and women of our day, who have passed out of their first youth. “The Elixir of Life,” which Bulwer dreamed and wrote of, which should restore youth, with its bounding pulses and golden locks, its capacity for physical enjoyment, and for building castles in Spain, I think I may say with confidence I would not drink four times a day, with twenty minutes’ promenade between the glasses (as I am just now drinking of the _source Cosar_ here), even if an _elixir vito source_ were to come bubbling up to-morrow in this enchanting Auvergne valley, and our English doctor here at Royat--known to all readers of Mr. _Punch’s_ “Water Course”--were to put it peremptorily on my treatment-paper to-morrow morning. It is not surely the “_good fellows_ whose beards are gray,” who sigh over the departure of muscular force, and sure quickness of eye and nerve, which enabled them in years gone by to jump five-barred gates or get down to leg-shooters. They are glad to see the boys doing these things, and rejoicing in them; but, for themselves, do not desire any more to jump five-barred gates or get down to leg-shooters. They have learned the wise man’s lesson, that there is a time for all things, and that those who linger on life’s journey and fancy they can still occupy the pleasant roadside places after their part of the column has passed on ahead, will surely find themselves in the way of, and be shouldered out by, the next division, without a chance of being able to regain their place in the line, side by side with old comrades and contemporaries.