Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 September 1890 — Happiness. [ARTICLE]

Happiness.

Happiness is the great aim of all mankind and for which all are forever driving; and ye-i how few there are who know when they have obtained it 1 The healthy, care-free boy longs for the time when he will be grown a man, and pictures in his youthful mind the happiness he will enjoy when he is forever free from parental control. "When the years have rolled past, and he finds himself what he has so ardently .wished for, he pauses, and, upon taking a Retrospective view, he as ardently longs for the joys, the happiness and. alas! too often for the innocence of childhood. Oh! how many of us old, care-worn, sin-scarred and toughhearted specimens of the “genus homo” would give all we have toiled, schemed and sinned for, since we arrived at man’s estate, to be again innocent children, and allowed the inestimable pleasure of a good, all-night glorious sleep, such as we used to enjoy when we were boys. Oh, for the days long gone, in recollection so vivid, in which we watched the gap all day long, sitting in the corner of the old wooden fence under the shade of the old elder bush, while we manufactured wonders of whistles from green pat/ paw bark, and cut our fingers with the new BarIpw knife which papa bought for us on the Saturday before. j We can shut our eyes now and see the old barn, the pump at the roadside, with the horse trough near by; the wagon shed, granary and corn-crib combined; the half-finished wheat rick and, beyond all these, the dwelling with its log walls neatly painted and whitewashed—the very personification of that cleanliness which is next to godliness. And last, but not least, the old ash hopper, under which we used to play “house” with our little sister, before'we got big enough to go to school and “mind the gap;” And the closing of our eyes seems to have opened our ears, for we can hear the cackling of the hens, who seem to be holding a convention over some newly laid eggs in the barn, and the steady “thud-thud” of the loom at the house gives early promise of some new. cop-peras-colored pants. Now we hear the • “chuck,” “chuck” of the wagon coming, for the fourth time, well laden from the wheat field, and, as it nears the gap, there breaks forth from the house that which'to boys is the sweetest of all music—“tjre dinner horn.” Could we have but realized how happy we were then, we surely would have been contented; but such realization could not be, and the only difference which time has wrought in our thoughts on the subject is, that then we looked forward to find happiness, whereas now we look backward, and our happiest moments now are spent in a retrospective contemplation of the happiness which we enjoyed at a time when we did not realize it. How it softens the heart to recall those old days, and while I know that, in this world, happiness always seems to be either ahead or behind us, I do hope that in the world to come we may be allowed the happiness of again living over our boyhood days, and fully realizing their pleasures at the time.— Caspar Cringle,in Detroit Free Press.