'When my next birthday comes,' once said to me Oliver Wendell Holmes, 'I shall be eighty years young.' And he looked it—young, cheerful, with a kind, merry twinkle in his eyes.

'And,' I said to him, 'to what in particular do you attribute your youth? To good health and careful living, I suppose?'

'Well, yes,' he replied, 'to a certain extent, but chiefly to a cheerful disposition and invariable contentment, in every period of my life, with what I was. I have never felt the pangs of ambition.'

'You needn't,' I remarked. 'The most ambitious man would have been content with being what you have been—what you are.'

'Happiness, which has contentment for its invariable cause, is within the reach of practically everyone,' the amiable doctor asserted. 'It is restlessness, ambition, discontent, and disquietude that make us grow old prematurely by carving wrinkles on our faces. Wrinkles do not appear on faces that have constantly smiled. Smiling is the best possible massage. Contentment is the Fountain of Youth.'

That same evening he was the guest at a banquet given by a Boston club, to which I had been kindly invited. When he rose to make a speech, they cheered and applauded to the echo. His face was radiant, beautiful. After he sat down, I said to him:

'Are you not tired of cheers and applause, after all these years of triumphs?'

'No,' he replied; 'they never cheer loud enough, they never applaud long enough to please me.'

Oliver Wendell Holmes was right; he had found the key to happiness.

The philosophers of all ages have deservedly condemned that universal discontent and disquietude which runs through every rank of society and degree of life as one of the bitterest reproaches of human nature, as well as the highest affront to the Divine Author of it.

If we look through the whole creation, and remark the progressive scale of beings as they rise into perfection, we shall perceive, to our own shame, that every one seems satisfied with that share of life that has been allotted to it, man alone excepted. He is pleased with nothing, perpetually repining at the decrees of Providence, and refusing to enjoy what he has, from a ridiculous and never-ceasing desire for what he has not.

He is ambitious, restless, and unhappy, and instead of dying young at eighty, dies old at forty. He misses happiness which is close at hand all his lifetime. The object which is at a distance from him is always the most inviting, and that possession the most valuable which he cannot acquire. With the ideas of affluence and grandeur he is apt to associate those of joy, pleasure, and happiness.

Because riches and power may conduce to happiness, he hastily concludes that they must do so. Alas! pomp, splendour, and magnificence, which attend the great, are visible to every eye, while the sorrows which they feel escape our observation. Hence it arises that almost every condition and circumstance of life is considered preferable to our own, that we so often court ruin and do our very best to be unhappy.

We complain when we ought to be thankful; we weep when we ought to rejoice; we fidget and fret. Instead of smiling, which keeps the cheeks stretched and smooth, we frown, which keeps them contracted and engraves wrinkles on them.

Instead of looking at the rosy side of things, which makes the eyes clear and bright, we run after the impossible or the unlikely to happen, which makes us look gloomy. In short, I may say that old age is of our own make, for youth is placed at our disposal for ever and ever.