iV 
THE RAVEN’S NEST 
AFTER all, the Rosicrucians were an ignorant lot. 
They spent their days over alembics, cucurbits, and 
crucibles— yet they grew old. In our days many 
men —and a few women— have discovered the 
Elixir of Youth — but never indoors. The prescrip- 
tion is a simple one. Mix a hobby with plenty of 
sky-air, shake well, and take twice a week. I know a 
railroad official who retired when he was seventy. 
“He'll die soon,” observed his friends kindly. 
Instead, he began to collect native orchids from all 
points of the compass. Now he is too busy tramping 
over mountains and through woods and marshes 
even to think of dying. Anyway, he would not have 
time until he has found the ram’s-head and the 
crane’s-bill orchids and finished his monograph on 
the Habenaria. He will never grow old. 
Neither will that other friend of mine who collects 
fresh-water pearls, nor the one who makes me visit 
black-snake and rattlesnake dens with him every 
spring, nor those others who spend their time in 
collecting butterflies, beetles, wasps, and similar 
bric-a-brac. As for those four abandoned odlogists 
who have hunted with me for years, they will be 
young at a hundred. They rank high in their respec- 
tive callings. Yet from February, when the great 
