A TRAGEDY OF OLD AGE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10057, 31 May 1910, Page 4

A TRAGEDY OF OLD AGE.

I A remarkable parallel is to be found between a Btory of A. E. W. Mason'sand a tragedy in real lite reported the other day from Switzerland. Mr Mason's story concerns an old Swiss guide who has made his last important ascent All day he has been out with a young Englishman on a difficult expedition. In , the evening, at a little village inn. , he tells his companion that he has i

decided to give up dangerous work. He is still strong and active, but he ' knows that his time has corns. He is too old to guide men over dangerpus places; he must descend to the indignity of escorting tourist donkeys over low and safe gound. The tale is told with true and simple pathos. The old man has been a splendid guide, and the thought of having to leave the work that has been his only love, has almost the bitterness of death. He, who has warred for years with all the dangers of Alpine heights—to walk beside a tourist's donkey ! Tha tragedy in real life concerns Adolphe Balmat, one of the moat famous of Swiss guides, who recently commit • ted suicide within sight of Mont Blanc, the mountain his ancestor had been the first to scale, in 1786, and which he himself had climbed nearly seventy times. "He was no one-mountain man and the new Monte Kosa, the Matterhorn, and the ' Jungfrau equally well," says a Lor.don paper. "But, unwilling to risk my longer the lives of his clients or to content himself-he, the I great Balrnat—with beaten tracks, and unable to hear the mention of his name grow scarcer and scarcer, he has taken what is known as tne coward's way out." "How dull it is to pause, to mane an end; To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use, I As tho' to breathe were life." Next to death it is the commonest tragedy—this bitterness of being sup- | erseded owing to the inexorable deJ mands of old age.