AN ECHO OF THE PAST.
"Ah!" exclaimed Edith, who with her mother had been rummaging the drawers
of the safe as the doctor and I talked, "here are some letters, if I am
not mistaken. It seems, then, you used safes for something besides
money."
It was, in fact, as I noted with quite indescribable emotion, a packet of
letters and notes from Edith Bartlett, written on various occasions
during our relation as lovers, that Edith, her great-granddaughter, held
in her hand. I took them from her, and opening one, found it to be a note
dated May 30, 1887, the very day on which I parted with her forever. In
it she asked me to join her family in their Decoration-day visit to the
grave at Mount Auburn where her brother lay, who had fallen in the civil
war.
"I do not expect, Julian," she had written, "that you will adopt all my
relations as your own because you marry me--that would be too much--but
my hero brother I want you to take for yours, and that is why I would
like you to go with us to-day."
The gold and parchments, once so priceless, now carelessly scattered
about the chamber, had lost their value, but these tokens of love had not
parted with their potency through lapse of time. As by a magic power they
called up in a moment a mist of memories which shut me up in a world of
my own--a world in which the present had no part. I do not know for how
long I sat thus tranced and oblivious of the silent, sympathizing group
around me. It was by a deep involuntary sigh from my own lips that I was
at last roused from my abstraction, and returned from the dream world of
the past to a consciousness of my present environment and its conditions.
"These are letters," I said, "from the other Edith--Edith Bartlett, your
great-grandmother. Perhaps you would be interested in looking them over.
I don't know who has a nearer or better claim to them after myself than
you and your mother."
Edith took the letters and began to examine them with reverent curiosity.
"They will be very interesting," said her mother, "but I am afraid,
Julian, we shall have to ask you to read them for us."
My countenance no doubt expressed the surprise I felt at this confession
of illiteracy on the part of such highly cultivated persons.
"Am I to understand," I finally inquired, "that handwriting, and the
reading of it, like lock-making, is a lost art?"
"I am afraid it is about so," replied the doctor, "although the
explanation here is not, as in the other case, economic equality so much
as the progress of invention. Our children are still taught to write and
to read writing, but they have so little practice in after-life that they
usually forget their acquirements pretty soon after leaving school; but
really Edith ought still to be able to make out a nineteenth-century
letter.--My dear, I am a little ashamed of you."
"Oh, I can read this, papa," she exclaimed, looking up, with brows still
corrugated, from a page she had been studying. "Don't you remember I
studied out those old letters of Julian's to Edith Bartlett, which mother
had?--though that was years ago, and I have grown rusty since. But I have
read nearly two lines of this already. It is really quite plain. I am
going to work it all out without any help from anybody except mother."
"Dear me, dear me!" said I, "don't you write letters any more?"
"Well, no," replied the doctor, "practically speaking, handwriting has
gone out of use. For correspondence, when we do not telephone, we send
phonographs, and use the latter, indeed, for all purposes for which you
employed handwriting. It has been so now so long that it scarcely occurs
to us that people ever did anything else. But surely this is an evolution
that need surprise you little: you had the phonograph, and its
possibilities were patent enough from the first. For our important
records we still largely use types, of course, but the printed matter is
transcribed from phonographic copy, so that really, except in
emergencies, there is little use for handwriting. Curious, isn't it, when
one comes to think of it, that the riper civilization has grown, the more
perishable its records have become? The Chaldeans and Egyptians used
bricks, and the Greeks and Romans made more or less use of stone and
bronze, for writing. If the race were destroyed to-day and the earth
should be visited, say, from Mars, five hundred years later or even less,
our books would have perished, and the Roman Empire be accounted the
latest and highest stage of human civilization."