without feeling that an event has happened. Fifty! Why, the Psalmist's
limit is only seventy. Fifty from seventy. An easy sum, but what an
impressive answer! Twenty years, and they the years of the sere, the yellow
leaf. Only twenty more times to hear the cuckoo calling over the valley and
see the dark beech woods bursting into tender green. I look back twenty
years, and it seems only a span. And yet how remote fifty seemed in those
days! It was so remote as to be hardly worth thinking about. To be fifty
was to be among the old fellows, to be on the shelf, to have become an
antiquity.

And now here am I at fifty, and so far from feeling like an antiquity, I
feel as much of a young fellow as at any time of my life. I had feared that
when middle age overtook me I should feel middle-aged and full of sad
longings for the old toys and the old pleasures. How would life be
tolerable when cricket, for example, had ceased to play an important part
in it? Never again to have the ecstasy of a drive along "the carpet" to the
boundary or, with a flash of the arm, snapping an opponent in the slips.
What a dreary desolation life must be, stripped of those joys! And on the
contrary I find that the spirit of youth is no more dependent on cricket
than it is on the taste for lollipops. It consists in the contented
acceptance of the things that are possible to us. Do not suppose, young
fellow, that you are any younger than I am because you can jump five feet
eight and I have ceased to want to jump at all. The feeling of youth is
something much deeper and more enduring than the ability to jump five feet
eight. It may be as vigorous at eighty as it is at eighteen. It is only its
manner of expression which is changed. Holmes never admitted that he had
grown old. "I am eighty-three young to-day," he would say. And Johnson,
with his old age and his infirmities, still insisted that he was "a young
fellow"--as, indeed, he was, for where shall we find such freshness of
spirit, such a defiance of the tooth of Time as in that grand old boy?