ness. The list is familiar
enough: the railroad, the ocean steamer, photography, the spectroscope,
the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, anesthetics, electric
illumination,--with such lesser wonders as the friction match, the
sewing machine, and the bicycle. And now, we said, we must have come to
the end of these unparalleled developments of the forces of nature. We
must rest on our achievements. The nineteenth century is not likely to
add to them; we must wait for the twentieth century. Many of us, perhaps
most of us, felt in that way. We had seen our planet furnished by the
art of man with a complete nervous system: a spinal cord beneath the
ocean, secondary centres,--ganglions,--in all the chief places where
men are gathered together, and ramifications extending throughout
civilization. All at once, by the side of this talking and light-giving
apparatus, we see another wire stretched over our heads, carrying
force to a vast metallic muscular system,--a slender cord conveying the
strength of a hundred men, of a score of horses, of a team of elephants.
The lightning is tamed and harnessed, the thunderbolt has become a
common carrier. No more surprises in this century! A voice whispers,
What next?

It will not do for us to boast about our young days and what they had
to show. It is a great deal better to boast of what they could not show,
and, strange as it may seem, there is a certain satisfaction in it. In
these days of electric lighting, when you have only to touch a button
and your parlor or bedroom is instantly flooded with light, it is a
pleasure to revert to the era of the tinder-box, the flint and steel,
and the brimstone match. It gives me an almost proud satisfaction
to tell how we used, when those implements were not at hand or not
employed, to light our whale-oil lamp by blowing a live coal held
against the wick, often swelling our cheeks and reddening our
faces until we were on the verge of apoplexy. I love to tell of
our stage-coach experiences, of our sailing-packet voyages, of the
semi-barbarous destitution of all modern comforts and conveniences
through which we bravely lived and came out the estimable personages you
find us.

Think of it! All my boyish shooting was done with a flint-lock gun; the
percussion lock came to me as one of those new-fangled notions people
had just got hold of. We ancients can make a grand display of minus
quantities in our reminiscences, and the figures look almost as well