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The man who made these remarks was not a gallant of the ninety-ninth degree, but was a sober, intellectual man of threescore-and-ten and, judging from the clear, penetrative eye, one who had seen much of the world as it is. "From St John did you say, Mr. Metcalfe?" "Yes, sir. Her father is engaged in the shipping business there, and I am told is a very fine sort of fellow.
Least of all was he inclined to that most melancholy of all exertions which consists in rushing about to entertainments which do not amuse. In 1840 he wrote, in answering an invitation to the Opera: "Thy servant is threescore-and-ten years old; can he hear the sound of singing men and singing women? A Canon at the Opera! Where have you lived? In what habitations of the heathen?
My thought began with trying to fancy Saul's mother taking him to baptism. She was dead, when I went to Skylight, her son's wife. She went into the higher life at thirty-three of the threescore-and-ten cycle of the human period. How young to die! The longer we live, the stronger grows the wish to live. And why not?
For if you should reach the threescore-and-ten, things will have changed so much that this will be old Boston; and, Betty, you will be telling-your grandchildren what it was like." Betty laughed gayly. There was the same wide hall as at home, but it wasn't the keeping-room here. It had a great fireplace, and at one side a big square sofa.
He was close on the threescore-and-ten they were little more than children; but all three had the same gaunt, yet powerful frames; dark-red hair, which in the old man was but slightly sprinkled with gray; almost swarthy complexions; and a fierce, hard look in the deep-set eyes. By after inquiries, I learned that these were the father of the Highland cousin family, and his two youngest sons.
But even these outlines indicate a block of space which under geometrical increase would in the shortest of geological periods make a more complete conquest of the earth than has ever been made by fire or water. To say nothing of the sorrows of the composition of these new literary stores, how is man, whose years are threescore-and-ten, going to read them?
There, for that matter, they may be performing in some capacity now, though he must be an old scamp verging on threescore-and-ten, and she a woman of four-and-forty. May 1893, The widely discussed possibility of an invasion of England through a Channel tunnel has more than once recalled old Solomon Selby's story to my mind.
Another man had forestalled his fame by a period of about six weeks. Then the youth found that the goddess Philosophy, to whom he had vowed to dedicate his whole life, would not in return support him through a single hour of despair. In truth, the impishness of circumstance was newer to him than it would have been to a philosopher of threescore-and-ten.
"Yes," said Dick, "certainly we have beaten the threescore-and-ten of the old Jewish proverb-book. But then you see that was written of Syria, a hot dry country, where people live faster than in our temperate climate. However, I don't think it matters much, so long as a man is healthy and happy while he is alive.
When the circle is almost ended, and all the momentum of threescore-and-ten is gained, why not pass the line and enter into second childhood? What more beautiful truth in Nature's I Am, than obedience to this law? I've another fancy on the Big Blue to-night. It is a place for fancies.
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