HOW NOT TO CROW OLD.

Bruce Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 3038, 21 February 1899, Page 3

HOW NOT TO CROW OLD.

I am sometimes inclined to believe that in a generation or two we will have no more middle-aged women. One no longer finds them, at any ' rate, filling the corners of country piazzaß, Bpeotacled and stout, absorbed in new stitches for worsted-work, and new evidences to prove the deterioration of the young since their day. Instead, the piazzas of country houses and hotels are quite swept of every ono but the very old perhaps. Where once women only strolled through the woods near by.sat under the trees, sauntered to the post office once a day, or to the station to meet some friend, they now go off for hours on the wheel. You meet them everywhere on country roads. Coming upon them from behind you fancy, from the alertness of their movements and the slimness of their figures, that you have come upon young girls. But turn slud look ! and you will find women of fifty or sixty. Their hair, to be sure, may be gray and their faces seamed, but their cheekß will be flushed with health and their eyes brilliant with excitement. I chanced to fall into conversation with one I met. She told me she was seventy, and she confessed, with a reluctance I thought delightful and piquant, that she was amazed to discover that her youth had come back to her. Something in the sense of freedom which the bicycle gave her — the exhilaration of the exercise, the play of the wind about her face, something in the new possession of herself had brought back feelings she thought dead these thirty years at least. Golf has regenerated many a worn-out body and mind. Out-door, sports, in fact, as we all know, have enticed women away from sedentary pursuits and the monotony and confinement of in-door life, emancipating them meanwhile from many an iron prejudice, binding them hopelessly* and which neither philosophy nor legislation could loose them from. But the real secret of many of the changes that we see lies in the fact that each of these women has learned to be masters of some new medium of expression.

Until accident deprives us even temporarily of the use of our first two fingers, we fail to recognise how little we have hitherto done with the others, and how much we are able to do. And the same discovery might be made about all our other physical and mental endowments. We use but a tenth part of them, neglecting the others so long that they finally, through inactivity, shrivel up and disappear, while those we do use wear out too soou through over-use. Life, in fact, means activity, and growth is not possible where life has ceased to exist. We make, the mistake of supposing that growth, after the great meridan of middle age is passed, mean 3 either growing old or wearing out. And therefore it follows that one way, and the best way, if not the only way, of not growing oid, would be in the constant development of new parts of us, those too often disused. And 1 venture to say that if, for instance, every man or woman of middle age would resolve each year to master some new medium of expression and to exercise the mastery, doing this with enthusiasm, old age would cease his encroach ments. Queen Victoria was overoU when she began to learn Hindustanee. She writes her journal in it, and two of her attendants arc Bast Indians, with whom she can daily converse in that tongue. The reason she gave when she began was that it was not right for a sovereign to rule so many subjects as she. possessed in India of whose manner of speech she was ignorant. Whatever the C^ueen may now be physically, intellectually she is not impaired, aod the secret of her success is the secret of her knowing how to grow with her people, keeping pace through sixty years with all the progress, and, more than all, with their change of opinion, by each day learning new things. There are new languages for us all to acquire. And as wo have learned to ride the wheel, so those who do not know can learn to swim. There are new branches of science, of art, letters, and life open to us all. Nothing, indeed, will ever bring us so near to finding the secret of undying youth as this learning new things every year, mastering new mediums of expression. Why this is so is one of nature's secrets whicli we e:<n dis cover later if we will. But all wo need do until then is to overcome our own roluetan-je over settled habits and contents, and like the woman of 70 whom I met on her wheel, we will some day be surprised by finding our youth come back again. — " Harper's Bazaar," L. H. F.