speak with their superiors, not in intellect, for that is a
superiority that must be proved, but in station. If they cannot
find a friend to bully them for their good, they must find either
an old man, a woman, or some one so far below them in the
artificial order of society, that courtesy may he particularly
exercised.

The best teachers are the aged. To the old our mouths are always
partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen.
They sit above our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once
to our respect and pity. A flavour of the old school, a touch of
something different in their manner - which is freer and rounder,
if they come of what is called a good family, and often more timid
and precise if they are of the middle class - serves, in these
days, to accentuate the difference of age and add a distinction to
gray hairs. But their superiority is founded more deeply than by
outward marks or gestures. They are before us in the march of man;
they have more or less solved the irking problem; they have battled
through the equinox of life; in good and evil they have held their
course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown and
harbour. It may be we have been struck with one of fortune's
darts; we can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit tossed.
Yet long before we were so much as thought upon, the like calamity
befell the old man or woman that now, with pleasant humour, rallies
us upon our inattention, sitting composed in the holy evening of
man's life, in the clear shining after rain. We grow ashamed of
our distresses, new and hot and coarse, like villainous roadside
brandy; we see life in aerial perspective, under the heavens of
faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence of contented
elders, look forward and take patience. Fear shrinks before them