hat was the golden age born of? Any old man in Boston
will tell you that fifty years ago all people were honest. Fifty years
ago all people were sociable--there was no stuck-up aristocracy then.
Neighbors were neighbors. Merchants gave full weight. Everything was
full length; everything was a yard wide and all wool. Now everybody
swindles everybody else, and calls it business. Go back fifty years
and you will find an old man who will tell you that there was a time
when all were honest. Go back another fifty years and you will find
another sage who will tell you the same story. Every man looks back to
his youth, to the golden age, and what is true of the individual is
true of the whole human race. It has its infancy, its manhood, and,
finally, will have an old age. The garden of Eden is not back of us.
There are more honest men, good women, and obedient children in the
world today than ever before.

The myth of the Elysian fields--universally born of sunsets. When the
golden clouds in the west turned to amethyst, sapphire, and purple, the
poor savage thought it a vision of another land--a land without care or
grief--a world of perpetual joy. This myth was born of the setting of
the sun. A universal myth, all nations have believed in floods.
Savages found everywhere evidences of the sea having been above the
earth, and saw in the shells souvenirs of the ocean's visit. It had
left its cards on the tops of mountains. The savage knew nothing of
the slow rise and sinking of the crust of the earth. He did not dream
of it. We now know that where the mountains lift their granite
foreheads to the sun, the billows once held sway, and that where the
waves dash into white caps of joy, the mountains will stand once more.
Everywhere the land is, the ocean will be; and where the ocean is the
land will be. The Hindoos believed in the flood myth. Their hero, who
lived almost entirely on water, went to the Ganges to perform his
ablutions, and, taking up a little water in his hand, he saw a small
fish that prayed him to save it from the monster of the river, and it
would save him in turn from his enemies. He did so, and put it into
different receptacles until it grew so large that he let it loose in
the sea; then it was large enough to take care of itself. The fish
told him that there was going to be an immense flood, and told him to
gather all kinds of seed and take two of each kind of animals of use to
man, and he would com