Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 October 1888 — Fifty Years Ago. [ARTICLE]

Fifty Years Ago.

Glancing back only half a century affords contrast enough to quite reconcile one to this degenerate age. “M. Quad,” in the Detroit Free Press moralizes in a very funny way on such a retrospect: “Half a century—ahew ! We’d have ! waited and been born somewhere along about 1860 if given our choice. Yes, lots and lots of things have happened in the last fifty years. The old wooden cradle in which we were rocked is no more to be seen. Don’t you remember how high its sides were, and what a sense of solid security we babies had when deposited therein ? The rockers were long and heavy, the floor bare of carpet, and many a time the clickety-te-click lulled us to sleep. Pride first banished the old wooden cradle to the garret, and filled it with seed-corn or hickory-nuts. This wasn’t enough. The old relic was tumbled out of the window to become kindling, and the new baby was rocked in a slim-slam gimcrack made of willow or walnut. “Remember how they used us as babies and yearlings and two-year-olds? No soothing-syrups in those*days, my boy! If catnip tea was’t good for what ailed us they put on the spanker to effect a cure. We weren’t hidden away from measles and chicken-pox and mumps and whooping-cough, to affect us ten times as bad in later years, but the door was flung open and those ailments invited to walk into us and get licked at once and for ever. They didn’t sweat and smother us for fear of drafts, and they didn’t rush for a doctor if our sneezing machine set itself to going. We crept on bare floors; we ate johnny-cake and milk; we swallowed thimbles and peach stones and picked up live coals off the hearth. At a later day we stuck slivers in our feet, thistles in our hands and tore our woolen dresses in falling off the rail fences. “And that first week in school! We knew AB CD and E before we started, and we couldn’t imagine why any one should want to know more. Those big Brow r n boys called us a ‘tow-head,’ and that Sarah Ann Williams ran over us in the entry, aud the Smith boys threatened to lick us on the way home. As if all this wasn’t enough to swell our hearts and make us wish that we were dead, the sclioolma’am pinched our ear, rapped our knuckles and called out in a voice full of broken glass: ‘Didn’ I tell you that letter was G, and that G stands for gun ? Gis up here and Zis way down there!’ ”