But alas, so far even psychopathic treatment cannot promise to stabilize incomes. There must still be times when the just landlord must say to his tenant, "All is over between us; we must part forever--and at once." To which, judging by the tenor of some of the laws that have lately been suggested, the tenant may presently answer, "All right, you Old Devil. This is the tenth of the month, and I'll shake the dust of your disgraceful premises off my feet two years and six months from to-morrow."
It's a puzzling time for us landlords. Not long ago I felt compelled to raise the rent of fourteen married women and one (so far as I know) unmarried Chinaman. And then, overcome by conscience, I sat down and figured out a just rent. And when I had finished I came upon a distressing discovery. I had raised the rent of neither Mrs. Murphy, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Cawkins, Mrs. Trolley, Mrs. Karsen, Mrs. Le Maire, Mrs. Barber, Mrs. Sibley, Mrs. Carrot, Mrs. Mahoney, Mrs. Hopp, Mrs. Ranee, Mrs. Button, nor Charlie Wah Loo, anything like enough.
_To-day, my dear, I greatly astonished my grandson by standing on my head, and by entering the kitchen by turning a back-somersault through the door--exercises which I frequently practise for the benefit of my digestion, but not often in public. His bewilderment at seeing a man of my years perform such acrobatics was most comical. But there, there, one must amuse one's self with the young sometimes. I have thought more or less seriously of advising these exercises for general use; but few men have had the advantage of being brought up in a circus, and what seems easy to me would no doubt present insuperable obstacles to most. The main thing, after all, is not to grow old before your time, because the silly younger generation likes to flatter itself by thinking you antediluvian._--LETTERS OF FATHER WILLIAM.
Few men read Shakespeare, and so, fortunately enough, few think of themselves as being some day a pantaloon--lean and slippered (as Shakespeare described this sixth age of man), with spectacles on nose, his youthful hose, well-saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank, and his big, manly voice, turning again to childish treble, operating like a penny whistle when he tries to converse. But the Bard made a bogey: at any rate, there are fewer pantaloons visible than there probably were in Elizabethan England; and the sixth age of man appears more logically to offer a kind of Indian summer that is well worth living for. Shakespeare, it seems to me, slipped a cog in his sequence; and I prefer to think of Cornaro, the Italian centenarian, who began at forty to restrict his diet (though this I care less for), and wrote of himself at eighty-three: "I enjoy a happy state of body and mind. I can mount my horse without assistance; I climb steep hills; and I have lately written a play abounding in innocent wit and humor. And I am a stranger to those peevish and morose humors which fall so often to the lot of old age."