WHAT a wonderful change has come over this great country of ours since the days of our grandfathers! Look at our great cities, with their grand buildings, and their miles of streets, with swift-speeding electric cars, and thousands of carriages and wagons, and great stores lit by brilliant electric lights, and huge workshops filled with rattling wheels and marvelous machines! And look at our broad fields filled with cattle or covered by growing crops, and divided by splendid highways and railroads thousands of miles in length! Is it not all very wonderful?
"But has it not always been this way?" some very young persons ask. "I have lived so many years and have never seen anything else."
My dear young friend, if you had lived fifty or sixty years, as many of us older folks have, you would have seen very different things. And if we had lived as long ago as our grandfathers did, and then come back again to-day, I fancy our eyes would open wider than Governor Andros's did when he saw that the charter was gone.
In those days, as I told you, when any one wanted to make a light, he could not strike a match and touch it to a gas jet as we do, but must hammer away with flint and steel, and then had nothing better than a home-made tallow candle to light. Why, I am sure that many of you never even saw a pair of snuffers, which people then used to cut off the candle wick.
Some of you who live in old houses with dusty lofts under the roof, full of worm-eaten old furniture, have, no doubt, found there odd-looking wooden frames and wheels, and queer old tools of various kinds. Sometimes these wheels are brought down stairs and set in the hall as something to be proud of. And the old eight-day clocks stand there, too, with their loud "tick-tack," buzzing and ticking away to-day as if they had not done so for a hundred years. The wheels I speak of are the old spinning wheels, with which our great-grandmothers spun flax into thread. This thread they wove into homespun cloth on old-fashioned looms. All work of this kind used to be done at home, though now it is done in great factories; and we buy our clothes in the stores, instead of spinning and weaving and sewing them in the great old kitchens before the wood-fire on the hearth.
Really, I am afraid many of you do not know how people lived in the old times. They are often spoken of as the "good old times." I fancy you will hardly think so when I have told you something more about them. Would you think it very good to have to get up in a freezing cold room, and go down and pump ice-cold water to wash your face, and go out in the snow to get wood to make the fire, and shiver for an hour before the house began to warm up? That is only one of the things you would not find pleasant. I shall certainly have to stop here and tell you about how people lived in old times, and then you can say if you would like to go back to them.
Would any boy and girl among you care to live in a little one-story house, made of rough logs laid one on another, and with a roof of thatch—that is, of straw or reeds, or anything that would keep out the rain? Houses, I mean, with only one or two rooms, and some of them with chimneys made of wood, plastered with clay on the inside so that they could not be set on fire. These were the oldest houses. Later on people began to build larger houses, many of which were made of brick or stone. But I am afraid there was not much comfort in the best of them. They had no stoves, and were heated by great stone fireplaces, where big logs of wood were burned. They made a bright and cheerful blaze, it is true, but most of the heat went roaring up the wide chimney, and only a little of it got out into the room. In the winter the people lived in their kitchens, with the blazing wood-fire for heat and light, and at bed-time went shivering off to ice-cold rooms. Do you think you would have enjoyed that?
They had very little furniture, and the most of what they had was rude and rough, much of it chopped out of the trees by the farmer's axe. Some of the houses had glass windows—little diamond-shaped panes, set in lead frames—but most of them had nothing but oiled paper, which kept out as much light as it let in.
All the cooking was done on the great kitchen hearth, where the pots were hung on iron cranes and the pans set on the blazing coals. They did not have as many kinds of food to cook as we have. Mush and milk, or pork and beans, were their usual food, and their bread was mostly made of rye or cornmeal. The boys and girls who had nice books they wanted to read often had to do so by the light of the kitchen fire; but I can tell you that books were very scarce things in those days.
If any of us had lived then I know how glad we would have been to see the bright spring time, with its flowers and warm sunshine. But we might have shivered again when we thought of next winter. Of course, the people had some good times. They had Thanksgiving-day, when the table was filled with good things to eat, and election-day and training-day, when they had outdoor sports. And they had quilting and husking-parties, and spinning bees, and sleigh-rides and picnics and other amusements. A wedding was a happy time, and even a funeral was followed by a great dinner. But after all there was much more hard work than holiday, and nearly everybody had to labor long and got little for it. They were making themselves homes and a country, you know, and it was a very severe task. We, to-day, are getting the good of their work.