OLD HOUSES.

Feilding Star, Volume 2, Issue 316, 21 August 1924, Page 2

OLD HOUSES.

"Old houses!'' Why, to those who have the eyes to see and the heart to understand, there is magic and romance in the very sound of those words! Perhaps it is an old-fashion-ed tumble-down cottage that is doomed to destruction -a pathetic shell of a place, with worm-eaten walla and a sagging roof and broken window panes—a dejected, deserted abode of dust and cobwebs, of strange mysterious noises and ghostly sighs, of creeping shadows and tiny pattering things that scurry and scuttle to and fro in the silence of the night. Just that ami no more—to those who have not the eyes to see I .But to those who have—-ah 1 what tragedies and comedies may not those old walls have witnessed, what secrets kept untold, what joys and sorrows, what hopes and dreams, what mysteries and romances, what miracles of life and death may not have been enacted behind those closed doors! Maybe it was a. bride who first stepped laughing across the threshold and called the little place "homo"— a. bride in tho first flush of love and life and youth, radiant with joy and hope and tender dreams. Maybe it was a young mother who planted that climbing ro>so and watched it glow with her child from babyhood to maturitv.

Maybe during Lbc years of war a broken hearted woman sat at that window, clutching a cablegram with Stiff lingers and staring at unseeing eyes at the flowers that were to have welcomed her boy homo again. Here again, in this tiny room, perhaps, a little life was born—a Jifo destined, maybe, to influence a nation or leave its mark on. the world, a little ship launched on the sea of Jifo to sail away some day with its cargo of dreams and gifts and possibilities. And there, behind that closed door, perhaps ..tired eyes closed forever on the 'familiar world of material.things, and a weary spirit slipped out thankfully into the sunlight and freedom of the Great'Beyond!. i Just an old house! Yes, but also a little world in embryo, a silent witness of the never-ending cycle of birth and life and death and re-birth.