The Last Harvest by John Burroughs

The physiology of old age is well understood -- general sluggishness of all the functions, stiffness of the joints, more or less so-called rheumatism, loss of strength, wasting tissues, broken sleep, failing hearing and eyesight, capricious appetite, and so on. But the psychology of old age is not so easily described. The old man reasons well, the judgment is clear, the mind active, the conscience alert, the interest in life unabated. It is the memory that plays the old man tricks. His mind is a storehouse of facts and incidents and experiences, but they do not hold together as they used to; their relations are broken and very uncertain. He remembers the name of a person, but perhaps cannot recall the face or presence; or he remembers the voice and presence, but without the name or face. He may go back to his school-days and try to restore the faded canvas of those distant days. It is like resurrecting the dead; he exhumes them from their graves: There was G -- -- ; how distinctly he recalls the name and some incident in his school life, and that is all. There was B -- -- , a name only. There was R -- -- , and the memory of the career he had marked out for himself and his untimely death through a steamboat accident; but of his looks, his voice -- not a vestige! It is a memory full of holes, like a net with many of the meshes broken. He recalls his early teachers, some of them stand out vividly -- voice, look, manner -- all complete. Others are only names associated with certain incidents in school.[7]

[Footnote 7: These fragments, which Mr. Burroughs intended to expand into an article, were among the very last things he wrote. -- C. B.]