since we were counting up the
miracles we had lived to witness. The list is familiar enough: the
railroad, the ocean steamer, photography, the spectroscope, the
telegraph, telephone, phonograph, anesthetics, electric
illumination,--with such lesser wonders as the friction match, the sewing
machine, and the bicycle. And now, we said, we must have come to the end
of these unparalleled developments of the forces of nature. We must rest
on our achievements. The nineteenth century is not likely to add to
them; we must wait for the twentieth century. Many of us, perhaps most
of us, felt in that way. We had seen our planet furnished by the art of
man with a complete nervous system: a spinal cord beneath the ocean,
secondary centres,--ganglions,--in all the chief places where men are
gathered together, and ramifications extending throughout civilization.
All at once, by the side of this talking and light-giving apparatus, we
see another wire stretched over our heads, carrying force to a vast
metallic muscular system,--a slender cord conveying the strength of a
hundred men, of a score of horses, of a team of elephants. The lightning
is tamed and harnessed, the thunderbolt has become a common carrier. No
more surprises in this century! A voice whispers, What next?

It will not do for us to boast about our young days and what they had to
show. It is a great deal better to boast of what they could not show,
and, strange as it may seem, there is a certain satisfaction in it. In
these days of electric lighting, when you have only to touch a button and
your parlor or bedroom is instantly flooded with light, it is a pleasure
to revert to the era of the tinder-box, the flint and steel, and the
brimstone match. It gives me an almost proud satisfaction to tell how we
used, when those implements were not at hand or not employed, to light
our whale-oil lamp by blowing a live coal held against the wick, often
swelling our cheeks and reddening our faces until we were on the verge of
apoplexy. I love to tell of our stage-coach experiences, of our
sailing-packet voyages, of the semi-barbarous destitution of all modern
comforts and conveniences through which we bravely lived and came out the
estimable personages you find us.

Think of it! All my boyish shooting was done with a flint-lock gun; the
percussion lock came to me as one of those new-fangled notions people had
just got hold of. We ancients can make a grand display of minus
quantities