There was a great tinkling of teaspoons the other evening, when I took my seat at the table, where ail The Teacups were gathered before my entrance. The whole company arose, and the Mistress, speaking for them, expressed the usual sentiment appropriate to such occasions.
"Many happy returns" is the customary formula. No matter if the object of this kind wish is a centenarian, it is quite safe to assume that he is ready and very willing to accept as many more years as the disposing powers may see fit to allow him.
The meaning of it all was that this was my birthday. My friends, near and distant, had seen fit to remember it, and to let me know in various pleasant ways that they had not forgotten it. The tables were adorned with flowers. Gifts of pretty and pleasing objects were displayed on a side table. A great green wreath, which must have cost the parent oak a large fraction of its foliage, was an object of special admiration. Baskets of flowers which had half unpeopled greenhouses, large bouquets of roses, fragrant bunches of pinks, and many beautiful blossoms I am not botanist enough to name had been coming in upon me all day long. Many of these offerings were brought by the givers in person; many came with notes as fragrant with good wishes as the flowers they accompanied with their natural perfumes.
How old was I, The Dictator, once known by another equally audacious title,--I, the recipient of all these favors and honors? I had cleared the eight-barred gate, which few come in sight of, and fewer, far fewer, go over, a year before. I was a trespasser on the domain belonging to another generation. The children of my coevals were fast getting gray and bald, and their children beginning to look upon the world as belonging to them, and not to their sires and grandsires. After that leap over the tall barrier, it looks like a kind of impropriety to keep on as if one were still of a reasonable age. Sometimes it seems to me almost of the nature of a misdemeanor to be wandering about in the preserve which the fleshless gamekeeper guards so jealously. But, on the other hand, I remember that men of science have maintained that the natural life of man is nearer fivescore than threescore years and ten. I always think of a familiar experience which I bring from the French cafes, well known to me in my early manhood. One of the illustrated papers of my Parisian days tells it pleasantly enough.
A guest of the establishment is sitting at his little table. He has just had his coffee, and the waiter is serving him with his petit verre. Most of my readers know very well what a petit verre is, but there may be here and there a virtuous abstainer from alcoholic fluids, living among the bayberries and the sweet ferns, who is not aware that the words, as commonly used, signify a small glass--a very small glass--of spirit, commonly brandy, taken as a chasse-caf?, or coffee-chaser. This drinking of brandy, "neat," I may remark by the way, is not quite so bad as it looks. Whiskey or rum taken unmixed from a tumbler is a knock-down blow to temperance, but the little thimbleful of brandy, or Chartreuse, or Maraschino, is only, as it were, tweaking the nose of teetotalism.
Well,--to go back behind our brackets,--the guest is calling to the waiter, "Garcon! et le bain de pieds! "Waiter! and the foot-bath!
--The little glass stands in a small tin saucer or shallow dish, and the custom is to more than fill the glass, so that some extra brandy rung over into this tin saucer or cup-plate, to the manifest gain of the consumer.
Life is a petit verre of a very peculiar kind of spirit. At seventy years it used to be said that the little glass was full. We should be more apt to put it at eighty in our day, while Gladstone and Tennyson and our own Whittier are breathing, moving, thinking, writing, speaking, in the green preserve belonging to their children and grandchildren, and Bancroft is keeping watch of the gamekeeper in the distance. But, returning resolutely to the petit verre, I am willing to concede that all after fourscore is the bain de pieds, --the slopping over, so to speak, of the full measure of life. I remember that one who was very near and dear to me, and who lived to a great age, so that the ten-barred gate of the century did not look very far off, would sometimes apologize in a very sweet, natural way for lingering so long to be a care and perhaps a burden to her children, themselves getting well into years. It is not hard to understand the feeling, never less called for than it was in the case of that beloved nonagenarian. I have known few persons, young or old, more sincerely and justly regretted than the gentle lady whose memory comes up before me as I write.
Oh, if we could all go out of flower as gracefully, as pleasingly, as we come into blossom! I always think of the morning-glory as the loveliest example of a graceful yielding to the inevitable. It is beautiful before its twisted corolla opens; it is comely as it folds its petals inward, when its brief hours of perfection are over.
Women find it easier than men to grow old in a becoming way. A very old lady who has kept something, it may be a great deal, of her youthful feelings, who is daintily cared for, who is grateful for the attentions bestowed upon her, and enters into the spirit of the young lives that surround her, is as precious to those who love her as a gem in an antique setting, the fashion of which has long gone by, but which leaves the jewel the color and brightness which are its inalienable qualities. With old men it is too often different. They do not belong so much indoors as women do. They have no pretty little manual occupations. The old lady knits or stitches so long as her eyes and fingers will let her. The old man smokes his pipe, but does not know what to do with his fingers, unless he plays upon some instrument, or has a mechanical turn which finds business for them.
