He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make
themselves painfully or inconveniently evident. He carried his slight
figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure.
Once he spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of something
that was said, and "They will shrink, you know," he added, as if he were
not at all concerned in the fact himself. If you met him in the street,
you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a
clean-shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary
frown of his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well
gloved, in a silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he
did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think
it was kind to spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at
any rate, I am glad of the times when I did so. In society he had the
same vagueness, the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make
sure of you, he was as vivid as ever in his life. He made me think of a
bed of embers on which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when
these are breathed away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the
freshness of a newly kindled fire. He did not mind talking about his
age, and I fancied rather enjoyed doing so. Its approaches interested
him; if he was going, he liked to know just how and when he was going.
Once he spoke of his lasting strength in terms of imaginative humor: he
was still so intensely interested in nature, the universe, that it seemed
to him he was not like an old man so much as a lusty infant which
struggles against having the breast snatched from it. He laughed at the
notion of this, with that impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly
characteristic of the self-consciousness so marked in him. I never heard
one lugubrious word from him in regard to his years. He liked your
sympathy on all grounds where he could have it self-respectfully, but he
was a most manly spirit, and he would not have had it even as a type of