was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a
slave to my habits and couldn’t break my bonds.
To-day it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit. I have
never bought cigars with life-belts around them. I early found that
those were too expensive for me: I have always bought cheap cigars–
reasonably cheap, at any rate. Sixty years ago they cost me four dollars
a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven, now. Six
or seven. Seven, I think. Yes; it’s seven. But that includes the
barrel. I often have smoking-parties at my house; but the people that
come have always just taken the pledge. I wonder why that is?
As for drinking, I have no rule about that. When the others drink I
like to help; otherwise I remain dry, by habit and preference. This
dryness does not hurt me, but it could , easily hurt you, because you are
different. You let it alone.
Since I was seven years old I have seldom take, a dose of medicine, and
have still seldomer needed one. But up to seven I lived exclusively on
allopathic medicines. Not that I needed them, for I don’t think I did;
it was for economy; my father took a drug-store for a debt, and it made
cod-liver oil cheaper than the other breakfast foods. We had nine
barrels of it, and it lasted me seven years. Then I was weaned. The
rest of the family had to get along with rhubarb and ipecac and such
things, because I was the pet. I was the first Standard Oil Trust.
I had it all. By the time the drugstore was exhausted my health was
established, and there has never been much the matter with me since.
But you know very well it would be foolish for the average child to start
for seventy on that basis. It happened to be just the thing for me,
but that was merely an accident; it couldn’t happen again in a century.
I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never
intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any benefit
when you are tired; and I was always tired. But let another person try
my way, and see where he will come out. I desire now to repeat and
emphasise that maxim: We can’t reach old age by another man’s road. My
habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you.
I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other
people to try that, or for me to recommend it. Very few would succeed:
you have to have a perfectly colossal stock of morals; and you can’t get
them on a margin; you have to have the whole thing, and put them in your
box. Morals are an acquirement–like music, like a foreign language,
like piety, poker, paralysis–no man is born with them. I wasn’t myself,
I started poor. I hadn’t a single moral. There is hardly a man in this
house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that–the
world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral.
I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape,
the weather, the–I can remember how everything looked. It was an old
moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn’t fit,
anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a
dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World’s
Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat
of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she
will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive.
When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she
hadn’t any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all.
Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and
served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she