y years and have never seen anything else."

My dear young friend, if you had lived fifty or sixty years, as many of
us older folks have, you would have seen very different things. And if
we had lived as long ago as our grandfathers did, and then come back
again to-day, I fancy our eyes would open wider than Governor Andros's
did when he saw that the charter was gone.

In those days, as I told you, when any one wanted to make a light, he
could not strike a match and touch it to a gas jet as we do, but must
hammer away with flint and steel, and then had nothing better than a
home-made tallow candle to light. Why, I am sure that many of you never
even saw a pair of snuffers, which people then used to cut off the
candle wick.

Some of you who live in old houses with dusty lofts under the roof, full
of worm-eaten old furniture, have, no doubt, found there odd-looking
wooden frames and wheels, and queer old tools of various kinds.
Sometimes these wheels are brought down stairs and set in the hall as
something to be proud of. And the old eight-day clocks stand there, too,
with their loud "tick-tack," buzzing and ticking away to-day as if they
had not done so for a hundred years. The wheels I speak of are the old
spinning wheels, with which our great-grandmothers spun flax into
thread. This thread they wove into homespun cloth on old-fashioned
looms. All work of this kind used to be done at home, though now it is
done in great factories; and we buy our clothes in the stores, instead
of spinning and weaving and sewing them in the great old kitchens before
the wood-fire on the hearth.

Really, I am afraid many of you do not know how people lived in the old
times. They are often spoken of as the "good old times." I fancy you
will hardly think so when I have told you something more about them.
Would you think it very good to have to get up in a freezing cold room,
and go down and pump ice-cold water to wash your face, and go out in the
snow to get wood to make the fire, and shiver for an hour before the
house began to warm up? That is only one of the things you would not
find pleasant. I shall certainly have to stop here and tell you about
how people lived in old times, and then you can say if you would like to
go back to them.

Would any boy and girl among you care to live in a little one-story
house, made of rough logs laid one on another, and with a roof of
thatch--that is, of straw or reeds, or anything that would keep ou