Our babies hear few cradle songs under the new regime, except such as are crooned, more or less tunelessly, by foreign nurses.  Girls no longer sing old ballads in the twilight to weary fathers and allure restless brothers to pass the evening at home in innocent participation in an impromptu concert, the boys bearing their part with voice and banjo or flute.  We did not make perfect music when these domestic entertainments were in vogue, but we helped make happy homes and clean lives.

We used to sing—­all of us together—­upon the country porch on summer nights, not disdaining “Nelly Was a Lady” and the “Old Kentucky Home,” and sea songs and love songs and battle songs that had thundering choruses in which bassos told mightily.  Moore was in high repute, and Dempster and Bailey were in vogue.  The words we sang were real poetry, and so distinctly enunciated as to leave no doubt in the listener’s mind as to the language in which they were written.  We had not learned that tunes were musical tricks.  Better still were the Sunday evenings about the piano, everybody lending a helping (never hindering) voice, from grandpapa’s cracked pipe down to the baby’s tiny treble.  Every morning the Lord of the home heard “our voices ascending high” from the family altar, and in the nursery feverish or wakefully-fretful children were lulled to health-giving slumber by the mother’s hymns.

These are some of the bits of home and church life we would do well to bring forward and add to the more intricate sum of to-day’s living.  Granted, if you will, that we have outgrown what were to us the seemly garments of that past.  Before relegating them to the attic or ragpicker, would it not be prudent and pleasant to preserve the laces with which they were trimmed?

CHAPTER XXXIII.

FAMILY RELIGION.

We are living in an age of surprising inventions and marvelous machinery.  As a natural sequence, ours is an age of delegation.  The habit of doing nothing by hand that can be as well done by a machine begets the desire to seek out new and presumably better methods of performing every duty appointed to each of us.  Fine penmanship is no longer a necessity for the clerk or business man; skill with her needle is not demanded of the wife and mother.  Our kitchens bristle with labor-saving implements warranted to reduce the scullion’s and cook’s work to a minimum of toil.

An important problem of the day, involving grave results, is founded upon the fact that, with the countless multiplicity of Teachers’ Helps and Scholars’ Friends, International Lesson Papers, Sunday-school weeklies and quarterlies and the banded leagues of associated youth whose watchword is “Christ and the Church,” the children and young people of to-day are, as a rule, less familiar with the text of Holy Writ, with Bible history and the cardinal doctrines which the Protestant Church holds are founded