there."

"Well, you're a younger man than I am; but I've seen the day, as Lear says.
What an odd tendency we old men have to boast of the past: we would be
judged by the past, not by the present. We always speak of the strength
that is withered and gone, as if we had some claim upon it still. But I am
not going to talk in this storm. I am always talking."

"I will go with you as far as the village, and then I will turn and take my
way along the downs for a mile or two; I don't mind being wet."

"I didn't once."

"Don't you think," resumed Percivale, "that in some sense the old man--not
that I can allow _you that dignity yet, Mr. Walton--has a right to regard
the past as his own?"

"That would be scanned," I answered, as we walked towards the village.
"Surely the results of the past are the man's own. Any action of the man's,
upon which the life in him reposes, remains his. But suppose a man had done
a good deed once, and instead of making that a foundation upon which to
build more good, grew so vain of it that he became incapable of doing
anything more of the same sort, you could not say that the action belonged
to him still. Therein he has severed his connection with the past. Again,
what has never in any deep sense been a man's own, cannot surely continue
to be his afterwards. Thus the things that a man has merely possessed once,
the very people who most admired him for their sakes when he had them,
give him no credit for after he has lost them. Riches that have taken
to themselves wings leave with the poor man only a surpassing poverty.
Strength, likewise, which can so little depend on any exercise of the will