y). Though we were fain to discuss De Musset and Herbert
Spencer, Darwin and Dobson, George Eliot and Philip Gilbert
Hamerton--strange names to the elder generation--our scheme of life was
still essentially grave and plain for all Josephine's Japanese sunshade
and tendency to make the most of her willowy figure. Little did we
dream of the later development which, like a huge wave, was to sweep
over the land of the free and the home of the brave, overwhelming its
native simplicity with the virtues, tastes, and vices of the other
nations against which our forefathers barred the door. Palaces in all
but the name stand where the buffalo was wont to disport himself, and
where the American eagle in human form once flapped his wings and
screamed most viciously in contempt of the effete civilization of the
older world. Sons and daughters of the pioneers who bolted their
dinners on the stroke of twelve find seven too early for elegant
convenience. Among the reddest and palest of hot-house roses, which
deck their tables, glisten glass of Venetian pattern and china from the
bankrupt stock of kings. According to their intellectualities their
talk is of labor and capital, of working-girls' clubs and model
tenement-houses, of Buddha and Zola, of foreign titles, and
transplanted fox-hunting. To-day a hundred thousand dollars is barely
a competency, and a building less than a dozen stories high dwarfs the
highway of trade. The vestibule limited, the ocean grey-hound, the
Atlantic cable, and the voice-bearing telephone have made all nations
kin, and bid fair to amalgamate society. Even the newly created
species condescends to swap her birthright for a coronet.

All this has come to pass while Josephine and I have been plodding
along the route of all flesh, trying not to forget our early
aspirations. We have changed our dinner-hour with the rest of the
world; we have learned to talk more or less unintelligently about the
sweating system and Buddhism; we have bowed our necks to the yoke of
the electric wire. Now that Josephine has spurred me on to it, I have
even bought a modern house, and replenished my wardrobe so as to keep
pace with thought and custom. But, nevertheless, sitting here in my
renovated easy-chair, with my feet stretched toward the brass andirons
which were the pride of one of my great-grandmothers, listening to the
ticking of the old-fashioned clock which belonged to another of them,
and conscious that the ey