Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 January 1882 — The Final Festivity. [ARTICLE]

The Final Festivity.

One of the pleasantest affairs of the holidays this year was the watih meeting held at the residence of , Judge Hammond last Saturday night' The Judge and his genial wife were in the best possible humor for entertaining company, and Miss Louie flitted about with all possible dispatch ministering in every manner to the J leasure and comfort of the assembled guests. As the clock tolled the death-knell of the old year, all present seated themselves at the refreshment table, which was groaning under the many and* varied evidences of the host’s liberality and hospitality, and partook of tLe choicest of viands, The signs of that lime certainly betokened a propitious future for all participants for the coming year. However gay and jolly New Year’s watch meetings may be, the mind is prone on such occasions to seek the past.

“There’s a feeling within us that loves io revert Io the merry old times hat are gone.” Merry,—yes, and hunpy. The happiness whic’? is inherent in the child, the guileless, careless romance of life, the poetry or existence, the essence of an earthly career; this is what one soliloquizes upon on New Year occasions. Many of the persons at this gath ering were children together, were schoolmates for years, and now, comparatively speaking, widely separated. they are men and women, pushed out into the world by the inevitable and invincible propulsion of advancing time, let us hope, to do with their might what their hands find to do.— Now we toil, we lay by, we treasure up, we put aside play for care, romance for fact, poetry for hard, prosy reality. On New Yeai watch ocsasions one experiences the truth of the poet’s sentient:

“There are moments of joy Which Fate cannot destroy.” Bright gleams of the past, like the gold dust of time, which annually glow and play through the mists of the past, as the old year dies, have the happy tendency to revive sinking hopes, encourage drooping spirits, and to send those who thus inhabit the past into the New Year surrounded by a halo of expectancy. Thus we pasred the time, thus we enjoyed the evening, and at 1:30 a. m., we adjourned, all present feeling that they were better for having been there. **