On this, the first of January of the year 1851, the nineteenth
century has reached its midway term, and many of us who shared its
youth have already warnings which tell us that it has outworn us.
We put our grizzled heads together, we older ones, and we talk of
the great days that we have known; but we find that when it is with
our children that we talk it is a hard matter to make them
understand. We and our fathers before us lived much the same life,
but they with their railway trains and their steamboats belong to a
different age. It is true that we can put history-books into their
hands, and they can read from them of our weary struggle of two and
twenty years with that great and evil man. They can learn how
Freedom fled from the whole broad continent, and how Nelson's blood
was shed, and Pitt's noble heart was broken in striving that she
should not pass us for ever to take refuge with our brothers across
the Atlantic. All this they can read, with the date of this treaty
or that battle, but I do not know where they are to read of
ourselves, of the folk we were, and the lives we led, and how the
world seemed to our eyes when they were young as theirs are now.

If I take up my pen to tell you about this, you must not look for
any story at my hands, for I was only in my earliest manhood when
these things befell; and although I saw something of the stories of
other lives, I could scarce claim one of my own. It is the love of
a woman that makes the story of a man, and many a year was to pass
before I first looked into the eyes of the mother of my children.
To us it seems but an affair of yesterday, and yet those children
can now reach the plums in the garden whilst we are seeking for a
ladder, and where we once walked with their little hands in ours, we