CHAPTER X.
OLD AGE, AND ITS REQUIREMENTS.
There is always something harsh and painful in the manner in which the anatomist and physiologist has to develope the characteristics of old age. The rude rending of all the drapery, the removing of the veil from the fading brow and bringing out with microscopic precision every furrow that time has made there, seems unkind and almost cruel. There is a natural desire in every woman to retain to the last the charms of her sex; the dread of the isolation of age makes her battle with time and gratefully receive any aid that may be offered to her—this aid it is our mission to impart. We have not only studied the characteristics of her declining days, but have paid special attention to the support which nature requires when she has passed into the sere and yellow leaf. To us there is something unkind and ungrateful in the contempt bestowed upon the epithet "old woman." We love and venerate those who have battled nobly with the storms of life, and as they draw near to the "land of promise" the exhaustion of earth seems only to ripen them for the skies, and although we are in the course of our vocation obliged to look closely upon the skin, and even beneath it to the shrunk and contracted muscles and shrivelled vessels, we never forget that that failing body is the temple of a noble soul, and requires to be treated kindly, almost reverently.
"In the third age of woman," says Walker, "generally extending from forty to above sixty, the physical form does not suddenly deteriorate; and, as has often been observed when premature infirmities or misfortunes, the exercise of an unfavourable profession, or a wrong employment of
