R. Austin Freeman 
The Unwilling Adventurer 

THE wayfarer on life’s highway who has reached that stage of this earthly pilgrimage which is graciously miscalled middle age -a period when the full-blooded green of summer begins to show certain sere and yellow adumbrations of approaching autumn; when the silvery frost of age has begun to gather on the temples and Time has written, in many a lined inscription, the epitaph of passions dead and gone, of sorrows buried and forgotten; if he should pause to look back and retrace in memory the stages of his journey, will surely let his eye roam fondly over the fairer scenes – the shady dells, the flower sprinkled meadows, the quiet streams by which he has rested in joy and peace – rather than the dismal wilderness through which he has struggled, despairing and dismayed…