FABULOUS LONGEVITY,

Dunstan Times, Issue 507, 5 January 1872, Page 5 (Supplement)

FABULOUS LONGEVITY,

" I heard of two aged men near Mekka, who were known to many Moslem pilgrims as being six hundred years old or more.. Our own grandfathers lived when George Iff. was king, not a hundred years ago, but one of those sheikhs might have been a sheikh who by like communication would have learnt from an eye witness the events of two thousand years ago, when the memory of Alexander still was young, and before Julius fought for the empire of the East. The British Association at a meeting reduced by live thousand years the ago ot the "Wollingtouia gigantea, and unlucky inquiries ■ have also brought down the ages of the sheikhs. T lose who had not been on the pilgrimage fixed them at six hundred or eight hundred years ; those who had been part of the way. said four hundred ;I was afraid to inquire nearer, Jest the old men should be reduced to hoys, and J should lose the pleasure of the marvel. The truth of the matter was that a sheikh taking possession of the tent ot a famous sheikh is known by that name, and that the ignorant multitude see in the perpetual succession of men of like name only one long lived individual. Often have faged and bowed men been pointed out to me as 150 years old, but I never could get such an ago proved A Turk can always gain a few years in age by the shortnessjofthc Turkish year. ATurkish friend who had been in llonmelia told me that at a great fair in the Adrianople district he had seen an old Greek 'woman sitting at the foot of a tree, selling wares : her ago she said was 150 ; but she pointed out her mother and grandmother, and said that her gre'it grandmother was at homo in the village, being now to infirm to attend the fair. The old woman got much custom, including some from my friend, but he did not go to the village to sec the eldest of the family.— Dickens's “ The Year Sound.”