DECLINING YEARS

(O many humans are inclined to measure age by the yardstick of years. I have seen men wrinkled, gray and ripe in right experience, but these men were not what we call old.

Oldness is when a man remains on earth just to tell his regrets. Senility means that your mind is mellow and your soul sad.

Before me is a letter telling of a man who has fought with all his might and main to ward off old age. And still he claims he is getting under the spell of years. The tell-tale wrinkles are showing in his face, and his flabby neck and slow step worry him. He feels he has nothing to live for. He has a horror of dying. He claims that life has always been so sweet to him, but now he knows he is growing old -not growing, but that he is really old.

There is a pathos, a tragedy in this letter. The lines seem to come from the uttermost depths of the man's heart. He does not seem to understand that he is to blame. In his own statement he makes everything clear. He says he has fought against growing old, and this explains it. He has fought a losing fight-a hopeless fight.

It is the defeat that bothers himhave expected. It is his mental attitude. He expected too -a defeat that he should much. Had this man refused to fight, had he accepted the situation gracefully, his years would have proven but companionship, and his days not filled with regrets.

The man that continually walks with his feet wet with pessimism, the fellow who insists on marching through the low aisles that separate the memorial mounds of men that have lived, the chap who fails to see in these green tents something that commemorates his nothingness, the human who cannot find happiness each day in meeting other humans need go no further. He has reached hell.

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PUNCHES

THE compensating element is again found. Villa, the vampire, helped us to get ready.

The man who cannot speak our language is not half so dangerous as the educated traitor who talks too much.

O

FEAR

N the twenty-third day after the birth of a baby fear begins to show. Fear has a certain virtue, until it becomes so extreme that it might be pronounced a disease. The presence of the police department, the fire department, and of the preacher, these are all proofs that humans fear something.

Take the child in his early years and frighten him, and this experience will remain like a minute splinter in the child's mind, to torture him all through life.

In older years fear is recognized as one of the most contagious of all emotions.

While you and your upper conscious mind works, there seems to be a buried, a subconscious remnant of the mind, and this appears to cause you to fear something.

Fear is a painful emotion excited by danger, apprehension or alarm. Fear holds more men back than any other one thing in life. The moment you doubt, you probably fail to do.

Darwin explains that the standing on end of the hair is a relic of the bristling of animals, whose appearance is thus made more terrible to their antagonist.

Utter prostration, pallor, cold sweat and trembling can be traced to past generations who were compelled to struggle violently with some animal or some human foe.

But the fear that I want to more specifically refer to is the fear that is due to a continued mental attitude toward life and its usual obstacles.

Fear, when you sift it down, is a form of physical or mental depression.

The things you worry over, are, as a rule, about as dangerous to you as trying to swim on a drawing-room carpet. ᄆ

TOO SERIOUS

MOST of us take the world too seriously. In common with humanity, this is a personal fault of mine. Wex Jones, in his "Inklings and Thinklings," hits your funnybone with his logic, and the world is the better for it.

DAVEY JONES must have a lot of ships on hand just now.

ENCOURAGEMENT

ESS than ten years ago Eugene Grace was switching cars on the side tracks in the Bethlehem steel yards. Last year Grace made one million dollars, and men who know claim that he will be one of America's greatest business men.

Henry Ford was broke at forty.

Edward E. Loomis, the new president of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, began in overalls a few years ago. His first pay was about two dollars a day. Mr. Loomis says little and works much. One writer complains of Mr. Loomis' lack of conversation in this way: "It is as easy to get him to talk as it is to get a meadow lark to call like a catbird."

Dr. Steinmetz, the wizard inventor, got twelve dollars a week not so very, very long ago. His present salary is now one hundred thousand dollars a year. They pay him this for the service he renders.

The head of the Eastman Kodak Company helped his mother to hold together their little home while she took boarders.

My royal friend, James Logan, worked in a woolen mill from daylight to dark. Now look at him. He is not only a success, but he is a man.

Frederick Underwood, of the Erie, is every inch a selfmade man.

I could print thirty-two pages of proof that it's the man and not the opportunity.

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A FAITHFUL FAILURE

WHEN the crunching wheels can be heard out front; when the sweet perfume of the living flowers, in the front room, reach 'way back to the kitchen; when a very few friends look at each other in a sad, bewildering way over my belief, remember, please, to make the ceremony short, and have the epitaph simple-A Faithful Failure.

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NOT so long ago my mind, my body and my very soul all seemed to arrive at the big tabernacle of heaven. Directly in front of me sat William, a man that is generally known as the special partner of Divine Rights. And then it was that I knew I was dreaming.

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