at I could not have "made up" those
rhymes. Nevertheless we all laughed at them together.

A comet appeared at about the time of the Miller excitement, and also a
very unusual illumination of sky and earth by the Aurora Borealis. This
latter occurred in midwinter. The whole heavens were of a deep
rose-color--almost crimson--reddest at the zenith, and paling as it
radiated towards the horizon. The snow was fresh on the ground, and
that, too, was of a brilliant red. Cold as it was, windows were thrown
up all around us for people to look out at the wonderful sight. I was
gazing with the rest, and listening to exclamations of wonder from
surrounding unseen beholders, when somebody shouted from far down the
opposite block of buildings, with startling effect,--

"You can't stand the fire
In that great day!"

It was the refrain of a Millerite hymn. The Millerites believed that
these signs in the sky were omens of the approaching catastrophe. And
it was said that some of them did go so far as to put on white
"ascension robes," and assemble somewhere, to wait for the expected
hour.

When daguerreotypes were first made, when we heard that the sun was
going to take everybody's portrait, it seemed almost too great a marvel
to be believed. While it was yet only a rumor that such a thing had
been done, somewhere across the sea, I saw some verses about it which
impressed me much, but which I only partly remember. These were the
opening lines:--

"Oh, what if thus our evil deeds
Are mirrored on the sky,
And every line of our wild lives
Daguerreotyped on high!"

My sister and I considered it quite an event when we went to have our
daguerreotypes taken just before we started for the West. The
photograph was still an undeveloped mystery.

Things that looked miraculous then are commonplace now. It almost seems
as if the children of to-day could not have so good a time as we did,
science has left them so little to wonder about. Our attitude--the
attitude of the time--was that of children climbing their dooryard
fence, to watch an approaching show, and to conjecture what more
remarkable spectacle could be following behind. New England had kept to
the quiet old-fashioned ways of living for the first fifty years of the
Republic. Now all was expectancy. Changes were coming. Things were
going to happen, nobody could guess what.

Things have happened, and changes have come. The New England that has
grown up with the last