iversary.

Nowadays our celebrations smack of the Sunday-school more than of the
dancing-hall. The aroma of the punch-bowl has given way to the milder
flavor of lemonade and the cooling virtues of ice-cream. A strawberry
festival is about as far as the dissipation of our social gatherings
ventures. There was much that was objectionable in those swearing,
drinking, fighting times, but they had a certain excitement for us boys
of the years when the century was in its teens, which comes back to us
not without its fascinations. The days of total abstinence are a great
improvement over those of unlicensed license, but there was a picturesque
element about the rowdyism of our old Commencement days, which had a
charm for the eye of boyhood. My dear old friend,--book-friend, I
mean,--whom I always called Daddy Gilpin (as I find Fitzgerald called
Wordsworth, Daddy Wordsworth),--my old friend Gilpin, I say, considered
the donkey more picturesque in a landscape than the horse. So a village
fete as depicted by Teniers is more picturesque than a teetotal picnic or
a Sabbath-school strawberry festival. Let us be thankful that the
vicious picturesque is only a remembrance, and the virtuous commonplace a
reality of to-day.

What put all this into my head is something which the English Annex has
been showing me. Most of my readers are somewhat acquainted with our own
church and village celebrations. They know how they are organized; the
women always being the chief motors, and the machinery very much the same
in one case as in another. Perhaps they would like to hear how such
things are managed in England; and that is just what they may learn from
the pamphlet which was shown me by the English Annex, and of which I will
give them a brief account.

Some of us remember the Rev. Mr. Haweis, his lectures and his violin,
which interested and amused us here in Boston a few years ago. Now Mr.
Haweis, assisted by his intelligent and spirited wife, has charge of the
parish of St. James, Westmoreland Street, Marylebone, London. On entering
upon the twenty-fifth year of his incumbency in Marylebone, and the
twenty-eighth of his ministry in the diocese of London, it was thought a
good idea to have an "Evening Conversazione and Fete." We can imagine
just how such a meeting would be organized in one of our towns.
Ministers, deacons, perhaps a member of Congress, possibly a Senator, and
even, conceivably, his Excellency the Governor, and a long list