o Sewing
Circles anywhere where peoples' reputations were pulled apart while
under-clothes for alleged heathen were put together. Nobody ever
descended upon us at unreasonable hours with unwelcome Surprise
Parties eating us out of house and home and compelling us to stay up
all night dancing the Virginia Reel when we were so sleepy we could
hardly keep our eyes open. We didn't have to give dinners to people we
didn't like, or make calls on persons in whom we took no earthly
interest whatever. There was no question of Woman's Suffrage to make
an everlasting breach between Adam and myself; no church squabbles
over whether the new carpet should be pink or green, and as for
politics, there was not anything even remotely resembling a politic in
the whole broad land. If Adam or I felt the need of a law now and
then, we'd make it, and if it didn't work, we'd repeal it, so that
there were no endless discussions on such subjects, involving hard
feeling, acrimonious correspondence, and an endless chain of Chapters
of the Ananias Club all over creation. And when the children came
along I was permitted to bring them up according to my own ideas,
thanks to the entire absence from the country of inspired old-maids,
and omniscient editors, ceaselessly endeavoring to reduce a natural
maternal function to an arbitrary science. It has been said that I did
not have much to be proud of in the results of my efforts to bring up
my children right, and I suppose that in the case of Cain and Abel I
must admit that I have not; but I am not so sure that things would
have turned out any different if I had reared them after a Fireside
Companion pattern for the making of a panne velvet posterity. I will
go so far as to say that after looking over the comic supplements of
the Sunday Newspapers, I believe Cain would have killed Abel ten years
earlier than he did if he had had the example of the Katzenjammer Kids
and Buster Brown before him in the formative years of his life. So, on
that score, I am comfortable in my mind, much as I regret the
disastrous climax of the lives of those two boys. In connection with
this matter of the bringing up of children I believe, too, that
despite the narrowness of our outlook, the primitive conditions were
better than those which now exist. I never heard of my boys running
loose about town waking up the whole community with their cheers
because their college football team had crippled eleven other boys
from another c