The New England Country

JANUARY
OLD FIREPLACE
A FOOT-STOVE
About “old times” there always hovers a peculiar charm. A dreamland atmosphere overhangs them. The present, as we battle along through it, seems full of hard, dry facts; but, looking back, experience takes on a rosy hue. The sharp edges are gone. Even the trials and difficulties which assailed us have for the most part lost their power to pain or try us, and take on a story-book interest in this mellow land of memories.
CANES AND UMBRELLAS
To speak of “the good old times” is to gently implicate the present, and the mild disapproval of the new therein suggested is, from elderly people, to be expected. We grow conservative with age. Quiet is more pleasing than change. The softened outlines of the past have an attraction which the present matter-of-fact hurry and work have not, and the times when we were young hold peculiar pleasure for our contemplation. To actually prove by logic and rule that the old times were better than the new would not be easy. They had their lacks. The world learns and gains many things as it ages. It is to be hoped that it grows better as it grows older; but even so the past has its charm, whether one of memories in which we ourselves were actors, or of story, which shows the contrast to the present which is the out-growth of that past.
THE CHURN
YE ENTRANCE OF OLD FASHION
In writing of “old times” we have a definite period in mind. All times, in truth, but the present are old, but wherever the phrase is met with, it refers to the years when the grandfathers and grandmothers then living were young. Ever since there were grandfathers and grandmothers there have been “old times,” and these times have kept even pace with the ageing of the world, following, shadow-like, the accumulating years, and always nearly three-quarters of a century behind the present. It therefore follows that the “old times” pictured in this volume have to do with the early part of this century.