The Project Gutenberg EBook of Backlog Studies, by Charles Dudley Warner

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Title: Backlog Studies

Author: Charles Dudley Warner

Last Updated: February 23, 2009
Release Date: August 22, 2006 [EBook #3134]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BACKLOG STUDIES ***

Produced by David Widger

BACKLOG STUDIES

By Charles Dudley Warner

FIRST STUDY

I

The fire on the hearth has almost gone out in New England; the
hearth has gone out; the family has lost its center; age ceases to be
respected; sex is only distinguished by a difference between millinery
bills and tailors' bills; there is no more toast-and-cider; the young
are not allowed to eat mince-pies at ten o'clock at night; half a cheese
is no longer set to toast before the fire; you scarcely ever see in
front of the coals a row of roasting apples, which a bright little girl,
with many a dive and start, shielding her sunny face from the fire with
one hand, turns from time to time; scarce are the gray-haired sires who
strop their razors on the family Bible, and doze in the chimney-corner.
A good many things have gone out with the fire on the hearth.

I do not mean to say that public and private morality have vanished
with the hearth. A good degree of purity and considerable happiness are
possible with grates and blowers; it is a day of trial, when we are all
passing through a fiery furnace, and very likely we shall be purified
as we are dried up and wasted away. Of course the family is gone, as an
institution, though there still are attempts to bring up a family round
a "register." But you might just as well try to bring it up by hand, as
without the rallying-point of a hearthstone. Are there any homesteads
nowadays? Do people hesitate to change houses any more than they do
to change their clothes? People hire houses as they would a masquerade
costume, liking, sometimes, to appear for a year in a little fictitious
stone-front splendor above their means. Thus it happens that so many
people live in houses that do not fit them. I should almost as soon
think of wearing another person's clothes as his house; unless I could
let it out