But do we talk as well as our fathers and mothers did?  We hear wonderful stories of the bright generation that sat about the wide fireplaces of New England.  Good talk has so much short-hand that it cannot be reported,—­the inflection, the change of voice, the shrug, cannot be caught on paper.  The best of it is when the subject unexpectedly goes cross-lots, by a flash of short-cut, to a conclusion so suddenly revealed that it has the effect of wit.  It needs the highest culture and the finest breeding to prevent the conversation from running into mere persiflage on the one hand—­its common fate—­or monologue on the other.  Our conversation is largely chaff.  I am not sure but the former generation preached a good deal, but it had great practice in fireside talk, and must have talked well.  There were narrators in those days who could charm a circle all the evening long with stories.  When each day brought comparatively little new to read, there was leisure for talk, and the rare book and the in-frequent magazine were thoroughly discussed.  Families now are swamped by the printed matter that comes daily upon the center-table.  There must be a division of labor, one reading this, and another that, to make any impression on it.  The telegraph brings the only common food, and works this daily miracle, that every mind in Christendom is excited by one topic simultaneously with every other mind; it enables a concurrent mental action, a burst of sympathy, or a universal prayer to be made, which must be, if we have any faith in the immaterial left, one of the chief forces in modern life.  It is fit that an agent so subtle as electricity should be the minister of it.

When there is so much to read, there is little time for conversation; nor is there leisure for another pastime of the ancient firesides, called reading aloud.  The listeners, who heard while they looked into the wide chimney-place, saw there pass in stately procession the events and the grand persons of history, were kindled with the delights of travel, touched by the romance of true love, or made restless by tales of adventure;—­the hearth became a sort of magic stone that could transport those who sat by it to the most distant places and times, as soon as the book was opened and the reader began, of a winter’s night.  Perhaps the Puritan reader read through his nose, and all the little Puritans made the most dreadful nasal inquiries as the entertainment went on.  The prominent nose of the intellectual New-Englander is evidence of the constant linguistic exercise of the organ for generations.  It grew by talking through.  But I have no doubt that practice made good readers in those days.  Good reading aloud is almost a lost accomplishment now.  It is little thought of in the schools.  It is disused at home.  It is rare to find any one who can read, even from the newspaper, well.  Reading is so universal, even with the uncultivated, that it is common to hear people mispronounce words that you did not suppose they had ever seen.  In reading to themselves they glide over these words, in reading aloud they stumble over them.  Besides, our every-day books and newspapers are so larded with French that the ordinary reader is obliged marcher a pas de loup,—­for instance.