Excerpt
1846
New Year's came in with a ringing of bells and firing of pistols. Four years more, and the world would reach the half-century mark. That seemed very ancient to the little girl in Old New York. They talked about it at the breakfast-table.
"Do you suppose any one could live to see nineteen hundred?" asked the little girl, with wondering eyes.
Father Underhill laughed.
"Count up and see how old you would be, Hanny," he replied.
"Why, I should be—sixty-five."
"Not as old as either grandmother," said John.
"If the world doesn't come to an end," suggested Hanny, cautiously. She remembered the fright she had when she was afraid it would come to an end.
"It isn't half developed," interposed Benny Frank. "And we haven't half discovered it. What do we know about the heart of Africa or the interior of China—"
"The great Chinese wall will shut us out of that," interrupted the little girl. "But it can't go all around China, for the missionaries get in, and some Chinese get out, like the two little girls."
"There is some outside to China," laughed Benny Frank. "And India is a wonderful country. There is all of Siberia, too, and British America, and, beyond the Rocky Mountains, a great country belonging to us that we know very little about. I believe the world is going to stand long enough for us to learn all about it. Some day I hope to go around a good bit and see for myself."
"Some people," began Mrs. Underhill, "reason that, as it was two thousand years from the Creation to the Deluge, and two thousand years more to the birth of Christ, that the next two thousand will see the end of the world."
"They are beginning to think the world more than four or five thousand years old," said Benny Frank. He had quite a taste for science.
"It'll last my time out, I guess," and there was a shrewd twinkle in Father Underhill's eye. "And I think there'll be a big piece left for Hanny."
The little girl of eleven mused over it. She had a great many things to think about, and her mother suggested presently that there were some things to do. Margaret went upstairs to straighten the parlor and arrange a table in the end of the back room for callers. Hanny found plenty of work, but her small brain kept in a curious confusion, as if it was running back and forth from the past to the future. Events were happening so rapidly. And the whole world seemed changed since her brother Stephen's little boy had been born on Christmas morning.
It was curious, too, to grow older, and to understand books and lessons so much better, to feel interested in daily events. There was a new revolution in Mexico; there was a talk of war. But everything went on happily at home. New York was stretching out like a big boy, showing rents and patches in his attire, but up-town he was getting into a new suit, and people exclaimed about the extravagance.
As for Stephen's baby, there wasn't any word in Webster's Dictionary to do him justice. He grew fat and fair, his nose became shapely, his dimple was deeper, his chin double, and his pretty hands began to grasp at everything....