Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 February 1881 — Good Old Times. [ARTICLE]

Good Old Times.

There were no tax collectors; no London cries; no Christmas bills; no lawyers to set men by the ears; to telegram to shorten your holidays; no newspapers to chronicle your shortcomings; no gunpowder barges to blow you up in your sleep; no steam launches to run you down when you sailed in your shallop by the reed margined river; no cynics to sneer at Christmas customs or question the reality of Christmas ghosts. In short it was the good old days. “Limited liability” was not yet created to fasten the intellect of finance and empty the pockets of fools. Turks and Egyptians were not borrowing in English markets, though there 'were occasionally objects of Christain attentions, which they have since returned without interest. The stage Irishman and the typical North countryman liad not yet shown virtue her own bright image and shamed vice into a corner. Mr. William Shakspeare had not flung broadcast ten thousand apples of discord to afflict a school of acting that struts and mouths and calls a child a “cheyld.” The shorthand writer was waiting to be bom with the press, and Lord Coleridge and the lord chief justice had not fired every other counsel and judge in the land with the desire to address law courts for fourteen days at a stretch. There were no perambulators, no Parisian modistes, no necessity for co-operative stores, no commission agents, no middlemen, no clerical magistrates, no school board beadles, no game laws, no ticket-of-leave, traders on charity, no Irish patriots, no deposit banks, no societies for clothing the Hottentots. As I said before, it was the good old days. The zodiac was the perfect order. Not a Christian man had heard of the vagaries of the Gulf Stream. May day brought its flowers and its festivals to the moment by the record of strictest sun dial. At Easter there were gammons of bacon all over the land, and Easter huts even in the warren of Stainess forest. The red men roamed at will in the undreamed forests of the New World. The dusky Indian had no master but his own untamed will. The wild bear and the wolf challenged the hunter’s power in English woods. The eagle sat in solemn state on the white cliffs of Dover. There were omens. The owl shrieked, the night crow crowed, the raven clapped his wings, death bells were heard at sea; your grandfather, clad in armor as ho lived, walked out of his picture frame, and once in a while some weird and witched tree would spout fire from its shrunken boughs. Night was night, and day was day. You rose with the lark, you rested when the sun went down on lands not yet weighed and mapped and colonized. Knives and forks were unknown implements, and when prince struck his wife he struck her with his mailed hand, and none could say him nay.— lnternational Annual.