Читать книгу Natural Wonders - Edwin Tenney Brewster - Страница 13

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After we grow up, we grow old. People say that we first grow up to men and women; then we continue adults; then we grow old. Really, however, we begin to grow old the day we are born; while we shall never again grow old so fast as we did when we were babes in arms.

For growing old is simply growing hard. We begin life as squashy little babies. Our bones are like green sticks. Our flesh is like dough, only the softest cloth must touch our skins, and Nurse has to hold her hand under our poor backs to keep our heads from dropping off. Children are not squashy, but they are still soft. You can pinch children. Sometimes you do. But you can’t pinch a grown man, any more than you can pinch a board. Children are of course, much harder than babies. All the same, if you put your fingers in your mouths, or stand too much on one leg or slouch over your books or shrug your shoulders up beside your ears when you play first base, or sit on one foot when you curl up in the big chair in the library, or do any other of the forty-leven things that somebody has to tell you forty-leven times a day not to do, then you will pull your bones all out of shape as if they were so much India rubber; and when you grow up and your bones and muscles set, then you can’t get back into shape again—tho you’ll wish you could.

For get hard you will. Then you will be grown up. When you are just hard enough, you will be in the prime of life, able to work as easily as you now play, and liking it, I hope, even better. But still you will keep on getting hard; and when you get too hard, then you are old.

So growing old is growing hard. And since the younger you are, the faster you grow, you never grew old so fast as when you were a tiny baby, and you never again will grow old so fast as you are growing old now.

And the moral is, as the Duchess used to tell Alice, that since we stay young and soft only a very short while, and grown-up and hard most of our days, we’d better, as much as we possibly can, make the short end of our lives help out the long one.

What I mean is this. While we are young, we are soft and plastic and teachable. As we grow older, not only do our bodies harden, but our minds also. We can do a great deal more after we are grown up than we can while we are children; and I think we are, if less light-hearted, on the whole quite as happy. But we shall be a great deal less able to take up anything new. Let us, therefore, practice while we are young those things which will bring us most happiness, after we are too old to change.

For example, suppose a boy is fond of out-door games, as every normal and healthy boy ought to be. He plays baseball all the spring, tennis all summer, football thruout the autumn, and what there is left of the year goes into ice hockey. He plays expertly, has a glorious time; and he grows up manly and strong. This is as it should be—so far.

But suppose the same boy, thru school and college and at work. There is no more football for him, and no more ice hockey. For a few years he may get an occasional game of baseball; if he is very lucky he will get a little tennis. But tell me, boy who is reading this page, how many of your father’s friends and associates ever play at all the games at which you spend your spare time?

Now while we are supposing, let us suppose that this boy of ours, instead of spending all his spare time at games, spent only half. The other half he shall devote to sports which are not games. He shall learn to ride a horse, to fish, to handle a sail boat, to swim, row, paddle, to climb mountains, to take care of himself in the woods, and above all to walk thru level country and enjoy the sight of all he sees. By and by, this boy will grow up. In the natural course of things, he will put away bat and ball and hockey stick before he is thirty, but rod and saddle and oar will bring him happiness and health almost to the end of his days.

There is a difference too in games. One plays football thru school and perhaps in college—eight years at the outside. But one world’s champion tennis player was well by forty; he must have played thirty years. A golfer gets forty or fifty years of pleasure for the trouble of learning his game. You may think you will learn the boy’s game now, and the man’s game later. But you won’t. You will learn the man’s game now along with the boy’s, or else you won’t learn it at all. You will be too old to learn, and go gameless to your grave.

Or suppose a girl is fond of music, and learns to play, very nicely, the banjo. It will be charming enough, summer evenings on the porch—so long as one is young and has only a girl’s soul to express in music. But by and by she will grow up to be a woman, and have little children of her own. Will she get out her banjo Sunday evenings and play for them hymns and solemn songs, or tinkle coon melodies for them when they are sick? Indeed she will not. She will put that banjo on the top shelf of the spare bed room closet, and wish she had spent her effort learning some other instrument more worth while.

So it is with everything else. If, while we are young, we train our ears to enjoy good music, and our eyes to love good pictures and good furniture, cloudy landscapes and great trees, and our minds to care for the important things of life, literature and religion and art and science and politics and history, we shall still possess growing sources of happiness longer after we have ceased to care to read stories or to be able to play ball. A wise child will study the happiest adults whom he knows, and learn to like and to do whatever most helps to make them blessed.

However, I meant to tell about how we grow old, rather than how we can best get ready to be so.

Oddly enough, most living creatures do not grow old. They simply live along till some other creature comes along and eats them up, or till the cold weather comes on and they freeze. A fresh egg is so soft that it hardly holds together; a young chicken is as tender as you please; while an old hen has to be boiled for days in order to be eaten at all. But an old fish isn’t tough; neither is an old lobster. Who ever heard a cook asking for little oysters, for the sake of getting them tender and juicy, or a fisherman preferring small fish? We like these the better, the older and larger they are. All animals, before they hatch out of the egg, are very soft. Afterwards they all grow larger and harder. But some stop growing big and continue to grow hard; and some stop growing hard and continue to grow big. The first sort grow old; the second do not.

Now when you come to think of it, about the only animals that grow old are the four-footed beasts, ourselves, and the birds. But the rate at which these various creatures grow old may be very different indeed.

Let us take a new-born human baby, and a new-born puppy, and a new-born mouse. All these are helpless little babies; and all three start immediately growing up and growing old. But while it takes six months for the human baby to grow to be twice as large as it was at birth, the puppy doubles its weight in nine days; while the little mouse, in the first twenty-four hours doubles its weight twice, so that at the end of its first day of life it is already four times as large as at the beginning.

At six months, the human baby, if he is very much up and coming, as you no doubt, my reader, were, can just begin to sit up without a pillow at its floppy back; it cannot walk a step, and it hasn’t a tooth in its head. But a six months puppy is a wiggly little beast, who runs away miles when he gets lost, chews up the family overshoes, and is well on the way toward losing his milk teeth. Meanwhile the mouse has grown up to be as large as he ever will be, has children of his own and probably grandchildren.

At five years the mouse is dying of old age. The puppy has become a sedate and middle-aged dog; but the baby is still a little child, just beginning to go to school, and still some years from losing its first tooth. At ten years, the child is young, the dog is old, and the mouse has become ancient history.

You musn’t think that the larger animals live longest. A horse is as large as six or eight men, but it is old long before a man first votes, and the birds, which are in general much smaller than the beasts, also in general live three, four, and five times as long. Even the elephant, thought to be longest lived of all beasts, lives no longer than we. But fish and turtles and crocodiles and shell-fish and the like, which are neither beasts nor birds and grow big without growing old, may outlive even parrots, elephants and men.

I dwell upon this at some length because there is no doubt that just as the dog grows old more slowly than the mouse, and the man grows old more slowly than the dog, so some men grow old, more slowly than others. Some people have used up their lives and are old at fifty or sixty; some are still young and hard at work at seventy and eighty. Now it rests partly with ourselves which we shall be. Five is not a large number to multiply by. But five times your present age, my reader, will take you well up to middle life. In no small degree, it is for you to choose whether you will come to five times your present age with the best part of your lives over and done with, or with the best part still to come. What, in general, your fathers and mothers are telling you is right and teaching you to do, will contribute to the one result; what in general they are telling you is unwise and wrong will doom you to the other. That indeed is how we know that some things are right and others things are wrong. People have tried, many times over, and found out, to their profit or to their cost.