many shelves of our larger libraries, it is not easy to reproduce in
imagination the state of American society as it was a hundred years ago.
In order to do so we must exclude from the mind many objects and ideas
which have been familiar to us all our lives. We must subtract all of
material improvements, of changes in the method of doing things, of new
directions and wide divergencies in the current of thought and knowledge
that have come about in the interval. We must strip the modern home, for
instance, of appliances without which it is difficult to conjure up a
picture of comfort, much less of luxury. We must forget railways, and
the telegraph, and every other use of that still mysterious agent,
electricity. We must put out of our minds all notion of great cities, of
long lines of elegant shops, blocks of noble residences, spacious parks
adorned by every refinement of the gardening art, public buildings
capped with stately dome and graceful turret and sculptured front; all
notion of the later growth of recreation, the theatre and the concert
hall, the lecture platform, the brilliant holiday festival, the sea
excursion, the gay and attractive summer resort with its big hotels and
its countless luxuries. We must return in imagination, in short, to a
social condition but few remnants of which are still to be found in
remote corners of the country; the relics of which still visible to the
eye are rare and precious, and dwindling away day by day; and the life
and spirit of which have ceased with the broadened, gift-laden
civilization which has replaced the old primitive simplicity, and made a
powerful, teeming, and restless nation out of scattered villages and
colonies struggling to exist.

[Sidenote: Old-time Mansions.]

Still, there was a very distinct advance in culture, elegance, comfort,
and luxury, beyond the condition of the colonies in the previous