Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/350

346 short their career. There will be no difficulty in any one of us searching about in our experience and calling to mind instances of people who had acquired wealth and position, in the enjoyment of good health and relative youth, who yet strove so fiercely to keep themselves (or it may be their thought was for their friends chiefly), supplied with amusements that they fell into the fatal error of doing more than their health would warrant or their constitution sustain.

Perhaps the most important quality, mental or physical, which conditions the attainment and enjoyment of advanced years, is a serene mental view; a capacity for deliberate enjoyment of whatsoever betide. In short a cheerful temperament is as good as an insurance policy; indeed far better. Much might be said along this line of prevention of death by the prolongation of life, but it has been presented to every one of us many times in endless guises and from divers sources. The difficulties are that we fail to realize the practical applicability of oft-reiterated truths which become trite and wearisome and yet are of golden quality and unspeakable value. It is my purpose to offer a few useful hints how one may definitely set about to earn a postponement of the evil days which come upon all, it may be not of ill health, but of a lessening capacity for enjoyment. Heaven has been most cleverly described as being the condition of one who knows what he wants and is able to enjoy it when he gets it, and the reverse of this. Hell, is clearly the atmosphere of that individual who does not know what he wants and could not enjoy it even if he did get it.

Touching the question of self-education in serenity which is admittedly one of the most important accomplishments which any one can acquire, it will be found by each that ever so little attention in this direction will be followed by prompt reward. For instance take the ever present subject of diet. As the effects of age become obstrusive, it is the part of wisdom to omit the use of those stimulating articles of diet to which we accustom ourselves throughout our youth and adult life. It may not be so plain to all, as it is to a man even of my age, how easy and pleasant a thing it is to put aside this or that item of food or drink and substitute for it either less or something different and more suited to our present needs. It is almost a working axiom in the achievement of long life that the less we eat and the less variety of objects eaten, the better. Exceptions will arise; sometimes follies may be committed by carrying these thoughts too far. But in the main it can not be gainsaid, and a great array of conspicuous illustrative instances can be pointed out, that as a working equation, the least should be eaten compatible with existence, to secure the greatest amount of continued health. As will be shown more specifically later, the paramount condition of buoyant youthfulness, whose loss is known to characterize the beginning of old age, is elasticity of the tissues. To preserve flexibility, it may readily be possible, as