can beat you in the end. Even the hat-check boy grows old, becomes gray
and dies at last babbling of greenbacks.

To my own taste, old Time, it is more agreeable to make this evening a
season of gruesome brooding. Morosely I survey the faults and follies
of my last year. I am grown too canny to pour the new wine of good
resolution into the old bottles of my imperfect humors. But I get a
certain grim satisfaction in thinking how we all--every human being of
us--share alike in bondage to your oppression. There is the only true
and complete democracy, the only absolute brotherhood of man. The great
ones of the earth--Charley Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, General
Pershing and Miss Amy Lowell--all these are in service to the same
tyranny. Day after day slips or jolts past, joins the Great Majority;
suddenly we wake with a start to find that the best of it is gone by.
Surely it seems but a day ago that Stevenson set out to write a little
book that was to be called "Life at Twenty-five"--before he got it
written he was long past the delectable age--and now we rub our eyes and
see he has been dead longer than the span of life he then so
delightfully contemplated. If there is one meditation common to every
adult on this globe it is this, so variously phrased, "Well, bo, Time
sure does hustle."

Some of them have scurvily entreated you, old Time! The thief of youth,
they have called you; a highwayman, a gipsy, a grim reaper. It seems a
little unfair. For you have your kindly moods, too. Without your gentle
passage where were Memory, the sweetest of lesser pleasures? You are
the only medicine for many a woe, many a sore heart. And surely you have
a right to reap where you alone have sown? Our strength, our wit, our
comeliness, all those virtues and graces that you pilfer with such
gentle hand, did you not give them to us in the first place? Give, do I