BlockFairfield County, Ohio - The whole text, 1877 (part 7 of 7)
From A Complete History of Fairfield County, Ohio, published 1877. 379 words, reproduced complete and unedited. Source changes inside the text are labelled in place.
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The text
379 wordsMachine-read from scans of A Complete History of Fairfield County, Ohio, published 1877. Nothing has been corrected: fixing what looks like a misspelled name is how an invented one gets published. Source changes are marked where they occur.
In the log-cabin era the people had time to talk to each other ; time to help each other; time to visit and nurse the sick, and to bury the dead without a dollar's cost; time to walk a mile to help lift up the cow that was down with the hollow-horn ; and time to help pull the grey mare out of the well, or to hunt a neighbor's cow that was lost. Now, you could scarcely find a friend in all your circle of acquaintance that would stop one minute to help you in any exigency. Everything has to be paid for. If your wife or child dies, you can't make a respectable funeral for less than from fifty to a hundred dollars, whether you have five dollars in the world or not. The way things are now, no one has the courage to beard public opinion, and therefore fall they victims before it. Only last evening I met, separately, two old acquaintances on the streets of Columbus. They seemed glad to meet me; but the most brief compliments and inquiries passed, when their impatience appeared - something ahead demanded them. But there is no remedy, and complaints are follies.
As time has sped, together you and I, in fancy, have watched the gradual transformation of the wilderness we entered seventy-eight years ago, on the Hockhocking, into the garden. The Indians, and the wild animals, and the log-huts, and the pole-bridges, and the marshes, and the people we knew have all drifted away. The people have grown grey and died, and the domestic animals have turned to dust, with many of their generations. What can we say? Have the lessons of life made us better men and women? Has the world of men grown better ? The world is wiser. Is it better ?
No, dear reader, you and I will not part. Death will separate us; but if we have lived pure and good lives here, we shall meet in a purer and better and deathless world. And when the humble compiler of these pages has passed out of sight, its paragraphs will recall to your mind our journey together over a transit of three-fourths of a century of the most important era of earth's history.
Provenance
Text from A Complete History of Fairfield County, Ohio, published 1877, in the public domain in the United States and digitised by the Internet Archive.