on the particulars with senile rapture. I have been anxious to explain
my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right.
I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly
to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else. It sounds like an
exaggeration, but that is really the common rule for attaining to old
age. When we examine the programme of any of these garrulous old people
we always find that the habits which have preserved them would have
decayed us; that the way of life which enabled them to live upon the
property of their heirs so long, as Mr. Choate says, would have put us
out of commission ahead of time. I will offer here, as a sound maxim,
this: That we can’t reach old age by another man’s road.
I will now teach, offering my way of life to whomsoever desires to commit
suicide by the scheme which has enabled me to beat the doctor and the
hangman for seventy years. Some of the details may sound untrue, but
they are not. I am not here to deceive; I am here to teach.
We have no permanent habits until we are forty. Then they begin to
harden, presently they petrify, then business begins. Since forty I have
been regular about going to bed and getting up–and that is one of the
main things. I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn’t
anybody left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I
had to. This has resulted in an unswerving regularity of irregularity.
It has saved me sound, but it would injure another person.
In the matter of diet–which is another main thing–I have been
persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn’t agree with me
until one or the other of us got the best of it. Until lately I got the
best of it myself. But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince-pie
after midnight; up to then I had always believed it wasn’t loaded. For
thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and
no bite nor sup until seven-thirty in the evening. Eleven hours. That
is all right for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a
headache in my life, but headachy people would not reach seventy
comfortably by that road, and they would be foolish to try it. And I
wish to urge upon you this–which I think is wisdom–that if you find you
can’t make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don’t you go. When
they take off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put on
your things, count your checks, and get out at the first way station
where there’s a cemetery.
I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
I have no other restriction as regards smoking. I do not know just when
I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father’s lifetime, and
that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was
a shade past eleven; ever since then I have smoked publicly. As an
example to others, and–not that I care for moderation myself, it has
always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when
awake. It is a good rule. I mean, for me; but some of you know quite
well that it wouldn’t answer for everybody that’s trying to get to be
seventy.
I smoke in bed until I have to go to sleep; I wake up in the night,
sometimes once, sometimes twice; sometimes three times, and I never waste
any of these opportunities to smoke. This habit is so old and dear and
precious to me that I would feel as you, sir, would feel if you should
lose the only moral you’ve got–meaning the chairman–if you’ve got one:
I am making no charges: I will grant, here, that I have stopped smoking
now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it