The I.O.U.'s Have It.

The mind is a mint and its coin is currency for the mental merchandise of man; put up the shutters and the brain is bankrupt though bursting with bullion, and the I.O.U.'s have it. Days are stringed instruments and every one strikes a different page 50

“I wished that Dad would be his age.”

note. Many a man goes to bed with a bare living and arises in shot-silk pyjamas or a law suit. Adventure comes with the milk and only goes when it gets the go-bye.

Perhaps the greatest adventure in life is that period between the ignorance of knowledge and the knowledge of ignorance, called Middle Age. In the latitude of forty, human beings become human for the first time, and realise the impotence of being earnest. Having suffered the youthful pains of Age they enjoy the soothful pæans of agelessness; for they are neither in the “jeer and callow” nor the “sere and yellow.” They neither are taken to task like Lot's wife nor shaken to ask “what's life?” They make up for the time lost in being young by being young, although no longer young. They are neither young nor old, callow nor sallow, foolish nor mulish, puerile nor senile, half-baked nor fully cooked. They pause in their flight, and for a moment call a strike against the tyrant Time. They are for the nonce as ageless as Julius Caesar's unformed thoughts and their emotions are as piquant as a pickled pin-cushion. Middle-age is neither muddle-age nor fuddle-age —it is the age of reason defying “reason”; the age when man sees himself as mothers see him; thin on top and plump beneath, slightly gone in wind and teeth, caring naught for looks or “lacks,” out to show that “tacks is tacks.”