"Like most New England houses built seventy-five years ago, the farmhouse at the old Squire's had been planned without thought of bathing facilities. The family washtub, brought to the kitchen... More > of a Saturday night, and filled with well water tempered slightly by a few quarts from the teakettle, served the purpose. We were not so badly off as our ancestors had been, however, for in 1865, when we young folks went home to live at the old Squire's, stoves were fully in vogue and farmhouses were comfortably warmed. Bathing on winter nights was uncomfortable enough, we thought, but it was not the desperately chilly business that it must have been when farmhouses were heated by a single fireplace."< Less
Away down East in the Pine Tree State, there is a lake dearer to my heart than all the other waters of this fair earth, for its shores were the scenes of my boyhood, when Life was young and the world... More > a romance still unread.
Dearer to the heart; — for then glowed that roseate young joy and faith in life and its grand possibilities; that hope and confidence that great things can be done and that the doing of them will prove of high avail. For such is ever our natural, normal first view of life; the clear young brain's first vision of this wondrous bright universe of earth and sky; the first picture on the sentient plate of consciousness, and the true one, before error blurs and evil dims it; a joy and a faith in life which as yet, on this still imperfect earth of ours, comes but once, with youth.< Less
