HERE then is the record of my day's work still unfinished at
eighty. Nobody can be more surprised than I am that I am
still at work. Looking forward at life at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty,
generally finding myself tired and a little discouraged, having
always taken on things for which I was unprepared, things which
were really too big for me, I consoled myself by saying, "At
seventy you stop." I planned for it. I would burrow into the
country, have a microscope--my old love. I knew by this time
that was not the way for me to find God, but I expected to have
a lot of fun watching the Protozoa and less anguish than watch-
ing men and women.

But I discovered when seventy came that I still had security
to look after. I could make it by seventy-five, I thought, But I
did not. And I have come where I am with a consciousness that,
so long as my head holds out, I shall work. More important, I
am counting it as one of my blessings. In spite of the notion
early instilled into me that the place of the aged is in the corner
resignedly waiting to die, that there is no place for their day's
work in the scheme of things, that they no longer will have either
the desire or the power to carry on, I find things to do which
belong to me and nobody else.

It is an exciting discovery that this can be so. Old age need
not be what the textbooks assure us it is. Shakespeare is wrong.
Cicero, dull as he is in comparison, is more nearly right. More,
it can be an adventure. My young friends laugh at me when
I fell them that, in spite of creaking joints and a tremulous hand,
there are satisfactions peculiar to the period, satisfactions dif-

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