quite extinct now. You see big dusty ball-rooms in the old taverns:
ball-rooms that have had no dancing in them for half a century,
and where they give you a bed sometimes. There used to be academies,
too, in the hill towns, where they furnished a rude but serviceable
article of real learning, and where the local octogenarian remembers
seeing something famous in the way of theatricals on examination-day;
but neither his children nor his grandchildren have seen the like.
There's a decay of the religious sentiment, and the church is no
longer a social centre, with merry meetings among the tombstones
between the morning and the afternoon service. Superficial
humanitarianism of one kind or another has killed the good old
orthodoxy, as the railroads have killed the turnpikes and the country
taverns; and the common schools have killed the academies. Why, I
don't suppose this girl ever saw anything livelier than a township
cattle show, or a Sunday-school picnic, in her life. They don't pay
visits in the country except at rare intervals, and their evening
parties, when they have any, are something to strike you dead with
pity. They used to clear away the corn-husks and pumpkins on the
barn floor, and dance by the light of tin lanterns. At least, that's
the traditional thing. The actual thing is sitting around four sides
of the room, giggling, whispering, looking at photograph albums,
and coaxing somebody to play on the piano. The banquet is passed in
the form of apples and water. I have assisted at _some_ rural
festivals where the apples were omitted. Upon the whole, I wonder our
country people don't all go mad. They do go mad, a great many of them,
and manage to get a little glimpse of society in the insane asylums."
Staniford ended his tirade with a laugh, in which he vented his
humorous sense and his fundamental pity of the conditions he had
caricatured.