I want a robust old
age. I feel that I could never hope to have that much longer in
town,--city-born and city-bred though I am. I used to think, and I
continued to think for a long time, that I could not live if my feet did
not press a city pavement. The fact that I have changed my mind seems
to me, at my age, a sufficient excuse for, as frankly, changing my
habits. It surely proves that I have not a sick will--yet. In the
simple life I crave--digging in the earth, living out of doors--I expect
to earn the strength of which city life and city habits were robbing me.
I believe I can. Faith half wins a battle. No one ever dies up on this
hill, I am told, except of hard drink. Judging by my experience with
workmen here, not always of that. I never saw so many very old, very
active, robust people in so small a space in all my life as I have seen
here.
Are you answered?
Yet if, after all this expenditure of words, you still think I am
shirking--well, I am sorry. It seems to me that, from another point of
view, I am doing my duty, and giving the younger generation more room--
getting out of the lime-light, so to speak, which, between you and me,
was getting trying for my mental complexion.
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