Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 July 1895 — THE FIRST GRAY HAIR. [ARTICLE]

THE FIRST GRAY HAIR.

Xtu Discovery Murks an Important Point In Human Life. You know what it is to find the first gray hair In your head? It quite startles you; In fact. It amuses you so much, that you hand it around to the family circle that each member may laugh at the circumstance that a gray hair had been found where a gray hair was not so much as suspected, said a gentleman some time ago. Young people look at you with a new feeling, hardly knowing, Indeed, whether to address you as a stripling or a patrlardh. You have put one foot Into that somber and unbeautiful borderland which lies between summer ;uid autumn, and there is no going back again! All the gates are locked and God has taken the keys away.

A gray hair? It Is the signature of timel It Is the beginning of the end. It Is a hint that you have lost something; it is a flake which tells of the hastening snow. Such changes remind us in the gentlest possible manner that this is not our rest The night does not close in suddenly. The common end is not violence and terribleness. We go gradually down the steep, and as a general rule time is given for reflection. Your first gray hair says, think! You have come to a turn in your life. This gray hair is a notice to quit It is not a keen weapon which cruelly cuts us down; ’tls but a gray hair, and it says mournfully, think 1 The gray hair tells us that the hours are getting on, and presently the night cometh. There was your first day’s sicknessjtherewasyour first consciousness that your power of endurance was failing. What, indeed, is all life, from the sunny laughter of childhood to the mellow solemnity of old age, but a succession of blunders.