Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/31



"He travels and expatriates; as the bee From flower to flower, so he from land to land, The manners, customs, policy of all Pay contributions to the store he gleans; He seeks intelligence from every clime, And spreads the honey of his deep research At his return—a rich repast for me!"

generally begin too late.

Elderly gentlemen of eminence sit down to compose memories, describe with food minuteness babyhood, childhood, and boyhood, and drop the pen before reaching adolescence.

Physiologists say that a man's body changes totally every seven years. However that may be, I am certain that the moral man does, and I cannot imagine anything more trying than for a man to meet himself as he was. Conceive his entering a room, and finding a collection of himself at several decades. First the puking squalling baby one year old, then the pert unpleasant schoolboy of ten, the collegian of twenty who, like Lothair, "knows everything and has nothing to learn." The homme fait of thirty in the full warmth and heyday of life, the reasonable man of forty, who first recognizes his ignorance and knows his own mind, of fifty with white teeth turned dark, and dark hair turned white, whose experience is mostly disappointment with regrets for lost time and vanished opportunities. Sixty when the man begins to die and mourns for