e get put off with nowadays. As for the
wonderful deeds people did in those times and the extraordinary events
that happened, it takes three strong men to believe half of them.

I like to hear one of the old boys telling all about it to a party
of youngsters who he knows cannot contradict him. It is odd if, after
awhile, he doesn't swear that the moon shone every night when he was a
boy, and that tossing mad bulls in a blanket was the favorite sport at
his school.

It always has been and always will be the same. The old folk of our
grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden;
and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense
for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the
good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's
fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find
the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift as did the
German Minnesingers long before them and the old Norse Saga writers long
before that. And for the same thing sighed the early prophets and the
philosophers of ancient Greece. From all accounts, the world has been
getting worse and worse ever since it was created. All I can say is that
it must have been a remarkably delightful place when it was first opened
to the public, for it is very pleasant even now if you only keep as much
as possible in the sunshine and take the rain good-temperedly.

Yet there is no gainsaying but that it must have been somewhat sweeter
in that dewy morning of creation, when it was young and fresh, when the
feet of the tramping millions had not trodden its grass to dust, nor the
din of the myriad cities chased the silence forever away. Life must have
been noble and solemn to those free-footed, loose-robed fathers of the
human race, walking hand in hand with God under the great sky. They
lived in sunkissed tents amid the lowing herds. They took their simple
wants from the loving hand of Nature. They toiled and talked and
thought; and the great earth rolled around in stillness, not yet laden
with trouble and wrong.

Those days are past now. The quiet childhood of Humanity, spent in the
far-off forest glades and by the murmuring rivers, is gone forever; and
human life is deepening down to manhood amid tumult, doubt, and hope.
Its age of restful peace is past. It has its work to finish and must
hasten on. What that work may be--what this world's share is in