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Two or three times, C. C. Burlingham came to lunch with us in Weston, that wonderful man who lived to be more than a hundred years old and whose birthplace had been my Wall Street suburb.

His reading ranged from Agatha Christie to The Book Of Job and he had an insatiable interest in his fellow-creatures, while his letters were full of gossip about new politicians and old men of letters with whom he had been intimately thrown six decades before.

I could never forget the gaiety with which, when he was both blind and deaf, he let me lead him around his rooms to look at some of the pictures ; ;

and once when he came to see us in New York he walked away in a rainstorm, unwilling to hear of a taxi or even an umbrella, although he was at the time ninety years old.

There were several men of ninety or more whom I knew first or last, all of whom were still productive and most of whom knew one another as if they had naturally come together at the apex of their lives.

I never met John Dewey, whose style was a sort of verbal fog and who had written asking me to go to Mexico with him when he was investigating the cause of Trotsky ; ;

but I liked to think of him at ninety swimming and working at Key West long after Hemingway had moved to Cuba.

At Lee Simonson's house, I had dined with Edith Hamilton, the nonogenarian rationalist and the charming scholar who had a great popular success with The Greek Way.

Then there was Mark Howe and there was Henry Dwight Sedgwick, an accomplished man of letters who wrote in the spirit of Montaigne and produced in the end a formidable body of work.

I saw Sedgwick often before his death at ninety-five, -- he had remarried at the age of ninety, -- and he asked me, when once I returned from Rome, if I knew the Cavallinis in the church of St. Cecilia in Trastevere.

I had to confess that I had missed these frescoes, recently discovered, that he had studied in his eighties.

Sedgwick had chosen to follow the philosophy of Epicurus whom, with his followers, Dante put in hell ; ;

but he defended the doctrine in The Art Of Happiness, and what indeed could be said against the Epicurean virtues, health, frugality, privacy, culture and friendship??

Of Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe the philosopher Whitehead said the Earth's first visitors to Mars should be persons likely to make a good impression, and when he was asked, `` Whom would you send ''??

He replied, `` My first choice would be Mark Howe ''.

This friend of many years came once to visit us in the house at Weston.

Then I spoke at the ninetieth birthday party of W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, who embarked on a fictional trilogy at eighty-nine and who, with The Crisis, had created a Negro intelligentsia that had never existed in America before him.

As their interpreter and guide, he had broken with Tuskegee and become a spokesman of the coloured people of the world.