This is a description of a man from Vienna who just celebrated his 111th birthday. The story is from 1899, so the man was born in 1787, before the French Revolution!
He is not at all a mummy, but, on the contrary, hale and hearty. The old man was born in 1787. He was six years old when Louis XVI was beheaded, eighteen when the battle of Trafalgar was fought, fifty when Queen Victoria ascended the Throne, nearly sixty when the Revolution of 1848 changed the face of his fatherland. And here he is still, able to enjoy a glass of beer, bright-eyed enough to enjoy beauty, and ready to laugh at the nonsense of a girl.
On being asked how he lived in his young days, he said "I always worked hard and felt hungry after my work. Butcher's meat wasn't so dear then as it is now, and I always had two pounds at a meal and a pint of light Hungarian wine. I got drunk twice in my life ¨C once through my own fault and once through the fault of others, and I was so dreadfully ill afterwards each time that it was not difficult to keep sober with that remembrance on my mind." The patriarch thus describes the chief cause of his happy old ago: -- "I was never worried and I never grieved. I worked until I was tired, and then slept in unbroken rest until it was time to work again. It is those who sit brooding over their misfortunes who grow old before their time, and a whole night's sorrowing has never put a copper in any woman's pocket r made a misfortune lighter to bear."
