Love and Life

If times differ human nature and national character vary but little; and thus in looking back on former times we are by turns startled by what is curiously like and curiously unlike our own sayings and doings. The feelings of a retired officer of the nineteenth century expecting the return of his daughters from the first gaiety of the youngest darling are probably not dissimilar to those of Major Delavie in the earlier half of the seventeen hundreds as he sat in the deep bay window of his bed-room;