THE DAYS OF OUR GRAND MOTHERS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2391, 28 December 1899, Page 55

THE DAYS OF OUR GRAND MOTHERS.

A NEW YEAR'S EVE REVERIE.

We do not want them back again, those early Victorian days. Our new century will bs so much better with motor cars on land, steamships on the ocean, and balloons in the air. We can travel twice ai fast and twice as far ; we can vote, and fill up every spare moment with and social and political clubs ; we have ihigher education and almost complete equality ; we are so much better than our grandmothers — those poor, weak creatures who moved in the narrow circle of home life, and lavished all their affections on the man of the family, and who punctuated their conversation with fainting fits. We have so often told ourselves tliis story, and praked our own superior strength and wisdom. But now the old yeai is going out and the century with it ; it is the season of confession, and between ourselves, was there not a charm and a serenity about our ■ grandmothers and their days that are somehow missing in our modern torrent of progress? Just for once we may look back regretfully, and think with reverence of those few survivors of a bygone age, who still haunt' our bustling, restless, omniscient modern world — dear old dames who still wear their graceful little side-curls and bonnets with frills of quilted pink silk around the delicate facea Time has spiritualised ; old ladies who step daintily and speak as softly as Cordelia; who have quaint household maxims, and would fain rule our households by them ; who quote " The Christian Year " and "Mrs Hemans," and are shocked at the mention of Byron ; who strew lavender between the folded sheets, and insist on washing the best china themselves ; and Avho sit patiently in the afternoon sunlight sewing yards of miraculously fine needlework. Are wo so much stronger after all? Shall we sit as upright as they do when the threescore years are over: We are old women now at 40 ; but they ripened more ; slowly and kept even a faint bloom on their'cheeks at an age when ours will be haggard and grey. Even now it is against their principles to lie down in the day, and they can, take their walk without being exhausted. " So many worlds, so much to do," that is the burden that is wearing us out prematurely. They knew but two worlds—* the quiet household and the heaven beyond^ If they fainted now and then, we are the prey of nervous exhaustion. ' If they could not plan laws and social reforms, their hearts Avero softer to pity the individual sufferer, their hands more open to give to tho poor at their door.

Perhaps you are one of the privileged few who may enter grandmother's sanctum, the bedroom or sitting room with its dainty, muslin and linen, its antique portraits, its mother-o' -pearl tea caddy at hand ; ita stout furniture of mahogany and oak. A' fragrance of the past hangs about it from the pot-pourfie on the table that carries our mind back to the old-world village and trim English garden, where the roses and sweeb majoram were first gathered. It conjures up tender visions of those days when our grandmothers were girls. We may smile', but not contemptuously, at the old-fashioned poke bonnets and crinolines ; the quaint; prim airs, and pretty affectations of speech ; the confiding adoration with which the bride in the old picture clings to her bridegroom's arm. Even their prudery had something delightfully naive. There is the yellow fragment of an old letter from a young lady to her lover— both dead now for many, many years. "An assignation!" shewrites in ' her fine Italian hand, " Sir, I blush ! " At this distance of time ire will not say she protests too much, for she mefc him, with all her blushes, and married him', too, long ago. And after her marriage she did her duty in her "trivial round," -as we try to do ours in a wider sphere. Perhaps -she .thought even more of duty and less of pleasure than we do nowadays. The sense of the Divine Presence was stronger in those simple lives than in ours. So with' all their little failings and weaknesses we will pay our homage at the close of our century to the, English and Scotch gentlewomen of the past, good wives, good mothers, and good Christians. • And we will not forget a tribute to their daughters — the mothers of New Zealand ; many of them delicately nurtured in old-world city homes, who reared their children in log huts in the lonely bush and bore uncomplainingly the toil and hardships and dangers of the first settlers' lives. A new woman has come in with a new epoch, and we know that the world was ripe for her. But it would be a graceful act on her part to acknowledge that she has not monopolised all the virtues, and that her mother and grandmother, too, had some merits of their own.