There is so much to be said in favor of our own day, and the men and women of our own time, that a plea for a recognition of the quaintness and pleasantness of village life in the old days cannot seem unwelcome, or without deference to all that has come with the later years of ease and comfort, or of discovery in the realms of mind or matter.  We are beginning to cling to the elderly people who are so different from ourselves, and for this reason:  we are paying them instinctively the honor that is due from us to our elders and betters; they have that grand prestige and dignity that only comes with age; they are like old wines, perhaps no better than many others when they were young, but now after many years they have come to be worth nobody knows how many dollars a dozen, and the connoisseurs make treasures of the few bottles of that vintage which are left.

It was a restricted and narrowly limited life in the old days.  Religion, or rather sectarianism, was apt to be simply a matter of inheritance, and there was far more bigotry in every cause and question,—­a fiercer partisanship; and because there were fewer channels of activity, and those undivided into specialties, there was a whole-souled concentration of energy that was as efficient as it was sometimes narrow and short-sighted.  People were more contented in the sphere of life to which it had pleased God to call them, and they do not seem to have been so often sorely tempted by the devil with a sight of the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.  We are more likely to busy ourselves with finding things to do than in doing with our might the work that is in our hands already.  The disappearance of many of the village front yards may come to be typical of the altered position of woman, and mark a stronghold on her way from the much talked-of slavery and subjection to a coveted equality.  She used to be shut off from the wide acres of the farm, and had no voice in the world’s politics; she must stay in the house, or only hold sway out of doors in this prim corner of land where she was queen.  No wonder that women clung to their rights in their flower-gardens then, and no wonder that they have grown a little careless of them now, and that lawn mowers find so ready a sale.  The whole world is their front yard nowadays!

* * * * *

There might be written a history of front yards in New England which would be very interesting to read.  It would end in a treatise upon landscape gardening and its possibilities, and wild flights of imagination about the culture of plants under glass, the application of artificial heat in forcing, and the curious mingling and development of plant life, but it would begin in the simple time of the early colonists.  It must have been hard when, after being familiar with the gardens and parks of England and Holland, they found themselves restricted to front yards by way of pleasure grounds.  Perhaps they thought such