You can
tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. You shall
never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you
climbed up to that great place. You will explain the process and dwell
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.
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