Around the tea-table . , and,henceforth, for months, there shall be no shoes totie or blacken. Let us send the boys out into the country everyyear for an airing. If their grandfather and grand-mother be yet alive, they will give them a goodtime. They will learn in a little while the mysteriesof the hay-mow, how to drive oxen and how tokeep Easter. They will take the old people backto the time when you yourself were a boy. Therewill be for the grandson an extra cake in eachoven. And grandfather and grandmother will sitand watch the prodigy, and wonder if any other fam-ily ever had such grandchi
Around the tea-table . , and,henceforth, for months, there shall be no shoes totie or blacken. Let us send the boys out into the country everyyear for an airing. If their grandfather and grand-mother be yet alive, they will give them a goodtime. They will learn in a little while the mysteriesof the hay-mow, how to drive oxen and how tokeep Easter. They will take the old people backto the time when you yourself were a boy. Therewill be for the grandson an extra cake in eachoven. And grandfather and grandmother will sitand watch the prodigy, and wonder if any other fam-ily ever had such grandchildren. It will be a goodthing when the evenings are short, and the oldfolks eyesight is somewhat dim, if you can set up 296 AROUND THE TEA-TABLE. in their house for a little while one or two of theselights of childhood. For the time the aches andpains of old age will be gone, and they will feel aslithe and merry as when sixty years ago they them-selves rummaged barrack, and mow, and wagon-house, hiding eggs for CHAPTER L. SINK OR SWIM. WE entered the ministry with a mortal horrorof extemporaneous speaking. Each weekwe wrote two sermons and a lecture all out, fromthe text to the amen. We did not dare to give outthe notice of a prayer-meeting unless it was onpaper. We were a slave to manuscript, and thechains were galling ; and three months more ofsuch work would have put us in the resolved on emancipation. The Sunday nightwas approaching when we expected to make violentrebellion against this bondage of pen and had an essay about ten minutes long on someChristian subject, which we proposed to preach asan introduction to the sermon, resolved, at the closeof that brief composition, to launch out on thegreat sea of extemporaneousness. It so happened that the coming Sabbath nightwas to be eventful in the village. The trustees ofthe church had been building a gasometer back ofthe church, and the night I speak of the buildingwas for the first time to be l
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