Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 175, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 July 1916 — GOOD TIMES THAT ARE GONE [ARTICLE]

GOOD TIMES THAT ARE GONE

Wealthy Citizen Moralizes Over Things That Were, as He Recalls with Joyous Recollections.

Talk to Uncle Zenas and you will learn that to find Arcadia it is not enough to leave New York and come to Bloomfield Center. They aren’t as neighborly even there as they once were. There is qot the frank democracy that used to be in his young days. Too much of what he scornfully calls “codfish aristocracy” has come in and split the happy united village into what he calls “clicks.” They don’t have the good times nowadays like they did when they got up apple-cut-tings and corn-huskings, barn-raisings, and all the devices by which what was hard labor for one lone family was turned into a frolic for the whole settlement. Everybody knew everybody, and winter nights a whole parcel of ’em would pile into sleds and come bu’stin’ in on some family. Maybe they vyere getting ready for bed, but

the old man’d get up and put h|s pants on and take down the fiddle, and they’d move the chairs and things out and have a dance; stay up till all hours, and get home about time to feed the stock. Ah, dear! they were neighbors In those days!

“And. even so,'that didn’t come up to what he’d heard tell about of the heroic period of. this country, the romantic age. the log-cabin days, when they were all poor and struggling, but happy in their poverty, when the latchstring was always out, and they would share their last pint of cornmeal .with the wayfarer, not knowing where the next was to come from, but sure they would make out somehow.” Uncle Zenas shakes his head; doesn’t know what the country’s coming to. One wonders who could have listened to the old-time circuit-riders when they called not righteous, but sinners, to repentance. Seemingly we have lost something—something very precious.—Eugene Wood in the Century.