Would that our scrupulous sires had dared to leave
    Less scanty measure of those graceful rites
    And usages, whose due return invites
    A stir of mind too natural to deceive;
    Giving the Memory help when she would weave
    A crown of hope!  I dread the boasted lights
    That all too often are but fiery blights,
    Killing the bud o’er which in vain we grieve.

    Wordsworth.

“I am afraid sir,” continued the old man, as we resumed our walk and our conversation, “that you will begin to think my tale of things gone by both tiresome and unprofitable.  To me it is interesting, because, as I tell my story, my mind goes back to the days of my youth, and the early feelings, both of joy and sorrow, return to my heart as my narrative calls them up, almost as freshly as when the scenes were acting before my eyes.  But that the task is unprofitable, I cannot help sometimes confessing to myself, however pleasing it may be to my feelings.  Walker, and all that concerned him, are gone to the grave.  The world has marched on with wonderful strides since his day; his clumsy spinning wheel is now rendered useless by machinery; and even in his own little vale, a child’s hand can, in one short week, produce a greater quantity and a much finer quality of well spun yarn than he, poor man, twisted together during the long and laborious years of his whole life!  Why, then, should one look to him, and not to that child, as a model?  I feel that it would be absurd to take the latter rather than the former as an example, yet I confess I cannot assign the reason for it: and thus it is, that when I am told that the present age is in advance of the last, and ought rather to be my guide than the ways of antiquity, I am p. 44often driven into a difficulty, though never convinced;—what think you of the matter?&rdq............