SO: The Virginia Quarterly has completed half of its first century, and is now about to embark on the second half—fortunately with better hopes of completing that too than any of us mere mortal contributors could have.

When Bertrand Russell, himself then a nonagenarian, wrote congratulating a neighbor on the latter's eightieth birthday, he began his letter "My Dear Young Friend." No one, however much longer-in-the-tooth, would dare address the Quarterly in that fashion: all the same, this seems perhaps a permissible occasion for casting one's mind back: not merely to the year 1925 when the Quarterly first appeared, but to one's own earliest childhood. It is salutary to do this now and then, even if only because it brings home to one that decrepitude is not something peculiar to one's later years but starts the very day one is born: for I have been told (though never allowed to test it experimentally) that a newborn infant can hang by its hands, but loses this ability after the first few hours. Whether or not that is the case, his joints most certainly grow too stiff at a very early age for sucking his big toe in any comfort, as can any baby still in its prime.

But a general stiffening of the joints is not the only symptom of senescence which begins so young. There is also a general dimming of the five senses, of which the first to dwindle is the sense of smell. Babies are born with real noses, like an animal's. I can recall being able to tell people apart by their smell, just as my dog Rory could. If someone left his towel in the bathroom I knew at once whose it was—or even if he had recently been in a room I entered. I can't recall