advance of age to "being set free from service to a band of madmen."

When a man feels so, all is well and comfortable with him. He has
retired of his own free will from the banquet of life, having had his
fill, and is content. Our image of the last call does not apply to him,
but rather to those who, with appetites still keen, are sternly warned
that for them, willy-nilly, the banquet must soon end, and the prison
fare of prosaic middle age be henceforth their portion. No more ortolans
and transporting vintages for them. Nothing but Scotch oatmeal and
occasional sarsaparilla to the end of the chapter. No wonder that some,
hearing this dread sentence, go half crazy in a frenzied effort to
clutch at what remains, run amok, so to say, in their despairing
determination to have, if need be, a last "good time" and die. Their
efforts are apt to be either distasteful or pathetically comic, and the
world is apt to be cynically contemptuous of the "romantic" outbursts of
aging people. For myself, I always feel for them a deep and tender
sympathy. I know that they have heard that last fearful call to the
dining-car of life--and, poor souls, they have probably found it closed.
Their mistake has been in waiting so long for the call. From various
causes, they have mismanaged their lives. They have probably lived in a
numbing fear of their neighbours, who have told them that it is bad
manners to eat one's cake in public, and wicked to eat it in private;
and any one who is fool enough to allow his neighbours to live his life
for him instead of living it himself deserves what he gets, or rather
doesn't get.

A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom.
Neighbours, at the best, are an impertinent encroachment on one's
privacy, and, at the worst, an unnatural hindrance to our development.
Generally speaking, it is the man or woman who has lived with least fear