The Bamberg Herald

Good Old Times.

Aunt Jemima reads the paper and exclaims, "These deadly cars! Yesterday they maimed a draper and a dealer in cigars. They collide at every crossing, while immortal drivers swear, every minute they are tossing human bodies in the air. Always someone being mangled, always someone being slain; it is strange my nerves are jangled, that my topknot has a pain? We had so much grievous worries in the good old happy days, when we rode around in surreys, driving stately dappled bays. Would that Dobbin were returning from the shades where he is gone; for a joyride, I am yearning, for a joyride, Dobbin-drawn!"

Said I, "No sane man endorses such a wish as you express; I look back to dappled horses with a feeling of distress. Once I drove a spangled charger by the dingles and the fields, and my crop of grief was larger than my auto ever yields. Once a zephyr blew a paper, and old Dobbin shied thereat, and he cut foolish capers like a circus acrobat. He upset the buggy, and, then he ran twelve miles or more, and they bore me to my shanty on a borrowed cellar door. Once I went to see the pageant of the circus at our gate, and old Dobbin seemed the agent of the furies and the fates. When he saw the gun and tapir and beheld the tall giraffe, he kicked up another caper and he split the rig in half. I was crippled up, you betcher, crippled up both front and back and they bore me on a stretcher to the portal of my shack. Let me not, dear aunt, be blinded to the truth that makes men free: horses all are feeble-minded and as fatal as can be."

"We are prone, as we grow older, to look back, with eyes distrest, and to say, in words that smolder, that the old things were the best. But the old things all were phony as compared with modern things, and an auto beats a pony all to smithereens, by jings. If you had to drive a sorrel or a buckskin or a bay, you'd be saying things immortal every minute in the day. Do not let your cheeks grow wetter with the tears of vain regret, for the world is growing better; progress is the one sure bet."

Walt Mason.