UST at the end of April, we hired a low strong

single buggy and a mountain mare, and went zigzagging up from the Shenandoah Valley over pass on pass, and dipped slowly down through white-blossoming dogwood and filmy purple-pink Judas trees into the hollows and pockets of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The long, lank, blue-eyed men who gave us a pleasant "Howd'y, stranger" were of the same breed as some of those who marched back and forth with Stonewall Jackson over these same mountain trails when he played hideand-seek with the Union army. Barefooted, sunbonneted women like those we saw must have given the hungry soldiers food and drink; and shy children, running like rabbits, must have stooped behind overgrown rail fences to peer at the marching men, as these peered at us. But none of the same men, nor women, nor even children, did we see, for there are no old men or women in the Blue Ridge.

"They don't live long," said a mountain missionary. "Life's too hard here, and they can't stand it. Not more than half of them can read and write. They work in the fields and the lumber camps until they are worn out; and after that, there's nothing for them to do but just die. There isn't any old-age problem here; we aren't modern enough to have one."

It is true that the problem of old age is new, as history counts time, and that to some places it has not yet come; but in most of our modern civilizations it has not only appeared, but has been in part solved.

The problem has two distinct divisions; first, to create a civilization that can use

other things than brute strength, that de

mands something the old can supply; and secondly, to prepare people to furnish more than manual service, to satisfy alike the demands for strength in youth and brains in age. It is the first part of this problem which has been largely solved since the long, slow ages when we were all fighting-men and women. Our civilization has been so molded as to utilize all available brain service. But the second part of the problem-to train us all to be useful in age instead of dependent-has been hardly more than touched, and it is part of the work of the new profession of matrimony to prepare for this later usefulness. The young will push us out of our places, and it is then for us to fit ourselves for other work.

"In business and in the professions," Dr. Devine, Director of the School of Philanthropy of New York City, says, "maturity of judgment and ripened experience offset, to some extent, the disadvantages of old age; but in the factory and on the railway, with spade and pick, at the spindle, at the steel converters, there are no offsets." Would it not seem wise, then, to prepare for something in addition to the spindle and the steel converter?

There is in New York City a veritable Street of Sorrows, East Twenty-sixth Street, which is fronted by the great public hospital of Bellevue, and ends in the dock of the Department of Charities and Corrections. I have stopped many times to watch itambulances eddying up to the hospital doors; black wagons, carrying criminals just committed to the workhouse; other and slower black wagons, carrying the pauper

dead; and saddest of all who come, the aged poor. Once I stood at the desk beside the man who commits to the poor farm, when a woman brought her mother to be "put away." No, she couldn't afford to keep her mother with her; she had three children, and her husband was out of work. No, there wasn't anything her mother could do; she was "all wore out." The mother faltered that she had worked hard ever since she was a little girl and she "couldn't do no more." And how old was she? Why, fifty-five last month!

Fifty-five, with what ought to have been thirty vigorous years still ahead of her, yet "all wore out." Can the community afford such extravagance? And she wasn't even protesting. She had squandered her physical resources, and had never developed resources of another sort. But today a protest against the waste represented by such early consignment to the human junk-heap is rising from men and women everywhere. I have a letter from a farmer's wife in the Middle West who cries out against the waste of her own youth, and wants me to preach a crusade against overwork and lack of rest. "Tell every woman she should not work in the fields," she cries. "Tell her she should lie down in the afternoon for a rest, even if her house is not absolutely clean. Look at older women! What are they now, save gray hair and wrinkles? Tell every young woman to take care of herself, and she will be well preserved and her children will be glad and proud to show her off.

The problem such lives present is being more and more squarely faced. Day before yesterday, I took dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Evarts, who are farming in the great corn belt. They were bronzed from the sun, and so splendidly young and strong that I couldn't conceal my surprise when they introduced a daughter of sixteen and a son of fourteen. Mrs. Evarts laughed a little.

"We shan't grow old any sooner than we must. We will read and we will rest, no matter what happens to the work. See those trees over there? The creek is just under, and when I find myself getting too tired, I take a pole and line, and go out under them to fish. I can't even see the house, nor anything but the water and the bushes; and I never let anybody come with me, except sometimes Will, when he's tired too!"

And she told me how she didn't make butter, nor do the washing, and wouldn't.

piece bed-quilts, and how she had just helped to organize a women's club among her neighbors who were too far from town to join the one there. Mr. and Mrs. Evarts are garnering years of strength from those hours of fishing in the brook, for they have learned that you cannot find the strength of your youth a second time, and they do not mean to be "scrapped" when it is gone.

The protest is becoming nation-wide. We're beginning to recognize the folly of wearing out bodies too soon and having nothing left, and we are passing laws to limit the hours of labor and to keep children out of industry, so that people shall not only conserve their bodies, but have time to develop their minds as well. For whatever old age may bring to the body, it should not bring rest. to the brain.

I used to know an elderly couple, the Masons, living with their married son near Chicago. They were as sweet and loving as two people could be; sociable, too, till one wondered if sociability was the virtue it is cracked up to be with people who have allowed their mental development to be arrested. I remember dining there when an explorer, just back from the Caucasus, was also a guest. We were anxious to hear some of his wonderful experiences, but the conversation ran about like this:

Explorer: We wanted to get through the pass as soon as the snow was gone, and

Grandfather Mason (in a voice of gentle courtesy): Yes, I always found it paid to get started on things about as soon as the snow was off the ground. Now when I came to Illinois in the early days, I used to―(here follows long description of Illinois in the fifties, on which the family had been. brought up, so to speak, and under which they suffer silently, except Alfred, the youngest, who breaks in).

Alfred: But I didn't know the snow ever melted up there.

Mother (swiftly rebuking Alfred): Hush, dear, grandfather is talking.

After a decade or so of Illinois from grandfather, I tried to generalize the conversation by bringing grandmother in, hoping that we might create a diversion and get back to the Caucasus. But I found that early in her career Grandmother Mason had clamped her mind to the temperance movement, preserved fruits, and the people she had known as a girl, and that it was impossible to pry it loose now.

This sort of thing grew to be increasingly common at the Mason's; the intellectual level of the conversation was set by these two old people, who had allowed their minds to stiffen with their bodies, and hadn't taken in a new thought for twenty-five years. People refused to go there, since it always meant spending an evening with the early days of Illinois. The younger Masons are too courteous to snub their parents into silence, but they have come to take all their social life away from home. Now this was not the misfortune of the elder Masons, it was their fault. What right had they to forget that their own youth was a time of change? What right has any otherwise satisfactory matrimonial firm to transform itself into a clog on the brains of its offspring?

Fortunately, this mental rest cure isn't necessary to successful old age. The Elsworths, for instance, live in a town so small that the train stops there only under the compulsion of a flag. But what of it? What if all their children are grown and gone? What if Mrs. Elsworth does find it necessary to have a maid lift the housekeeping from her shoulders, and Mr. Elsworth retires intermittently to a lounge by the window? We went from New York City to visit them, and there wasn't a thing, from the proposed changes in the public school system to the new pictures in the Metropolitan Gallery, that they didn't want to know about. They read not only the traditional "best books" but the works of the new people-Bennett and Galsworthy and Shaw, and a dozen less known.

Mrs.

Elsworth had been the means of introducing a work on domestic science into the country school, and went over three times a week to oversee the pupils personally. Mr. Elsworth had a scheme for marketing the abundant fruit supply of the neighborhood, and was alternately sunk in government reports and freight schedules. We had planned to stay with them a day, but lingered a week to enjoy the atmosphere of mental stimulation which they have created out of the leisure of age.

Oh, it can be done! People can approach old age with strength enough for their diminished needs, and with minds. fixed on the present and the future, instead of on the past. It is a question first of developing a civilization that has need of some service beyond that of the biceps, and then of preparing oneself to furnish that service when the proper time comes.

The Sherwoods, living in a Western city, have managed to do these two things pretty effectively. Mr. Sherwood is a lawyer his wife a splendidly able teacher. T

have five vigorous children. When the youngest was six years old, Mrs. Sherwood, feeling that the public schools were not up to the standard, started a little school of her own. The school grew so rapidly that she not only had to employ assistants, but was obliged to rent a special building. It was not only a good school, but a profitable business enterprise. The Sherwood children went to college, went into business, married, and grew independent. There were many grandchildren, and much prosperity. And then came the cry, "Mother must stop her school!"

There was no reason for this except the conventional idea that the old, especially old women, should not work. In spite of her children's protest, mother, therefore, has kept right on with her school. She loves her independence for one thing, and her work for another. She never ran her school merely to make money; she loved her profession as her husband loved his. Does it not keep her in touch with interesting people and interesting things? Does it not keep her mind awake and eager? The minds of the Sherwoods are too firmly fixed on the future to give the early days of Illinois or the gossip of the last century a chance.

A year or so ago a young Jewish girl took me through the shops where the worn-out garment-workers of New York City remodel the worn-out apparel which the "old clothes" men collect and resell. We went, too, through the sweat-shops where boys and girls just out of school begin their lives of basting and cutting and finishing and pressing.

"Why do they have to work so young?" I asked her.

"Ain't they gotta earn money for their fathers?" said Yetta. "No man can't make a living in the trade if he's more'n forty and ain't got no children. No, ma'am! But they got such a respect off'n their fathers!”

That particular canker of considering children as a sort of old-age pension for their parents is eating into the whole profession of matrimony. Every class suffers from it. Last year a lovable German woman who has done my washing for years came to me in great trouble.

"Haf you heard how I have lose my son?" she cried.

"Oh, Mrs. Schultz! Which of the boys was it? How did it happen? When did he die?"

"Sharley-it was Sharley! But he ain't die he got married!"

I argued with Mrs. Schultz through a long evening. There was no objection to the new daugher-in-law, but "Sharley was looked upon as a legitimate financial resource, and Mrs. Schultz couldn't help feeling that she had been robbed.

And I found exactly the same disastrous attitude toward the sons in the family of the DeLavals, people very definitely "in society." They had two daughters and one son, and when they passed into the land of old age, the children, just grown, had to assume the burden of supporting the family. Beauty was an inheritance of the DeLavals. They took their perfection of form and color quite as a matter of course and without self-consciousness, but they knew it was an asset. Leonard, the son, went into the office of a stock-broker where his charm and good looks and many acquaintances were a decided asset. But with all his charm, he couldn't command an instant income large enough for the support of his parents.

I have heard that the DeLavals were quite frank with their children. Certainly the whole neighborhood knew that it had been put up to the oldest daughter, Marie, to marry a rich man; and when her engagement to Mr. Cross was announced, we all knew that she was going to do her duty to her parents and provide for their old age it was as though she had got a good position in a dry-goods store, only the pay for being Mrs. William Cross was higher. Now, William Cross was no rich villain buying an unwilling slave. He was merely a little too plump to enjoy walking; a little too old for a fresh interest in things; with a thin spreading of hair on the top of his head; a little too dull to excite mental curiosity; and a little too rich for a penniless beauty with dependent parents to refuse. Marie went dutifully to the affairs given in her honor, but she refused to hurry the wedding, and in the meantime the beautiful younger sister, Norine, grew up and prepared to assume her share of the family burden in a less pleasant form.

Lee Morton, her "catch," was young and cheerfully good-looking, but with a fortune. that had come to him too early for his own good-in fact, decidedly to his detriment. He could not be put off as William Cross was, and Norine married him promptly. Truth compels me to say that these de