New England had kept to the quiet old-fashioned ways of
living for the first fifty years of the Republic. Now all was
expectancy. Changes were coming. Things were going to happen,
nobody could guess what.
Things have happened, and changes have come. The New England that
has grown up with the last fifty years is not at all the New
England that our fathers knew. We speak of having been reared
under Puritanic influences, but the traditionary sternness of
these was much modified, even in the childhood of the generation
to which I belong. We did not recognize the grim features
of the Puritan, as we used sometimes to read about him, in our
parents or relatives. And yet we were children of the Puritans.
Everything that was new or strange came to us at Lowell. And most
of the remarkable people of the day came also. How strange it was
to see Mar Yohannan, a Nestorian bishop, walking through the
factory yard in his Oriental robes with more than a child's
wonder on his face at the stir and rush of everything! He came
from Boston by railroad, and was present at the wedding at the
clergyman's house where he visited.
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