Salmagundi; or, The whim-whams and opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, esq. [pseud.] and others. By William Irving, James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. Printed from the original ed., with a preface and notes by Evert A. Duyckinck.

394 SALMAG UNI)I.
Sunday clothes, and freed from their only cares, the cares of the
school, tripping through the streets on errands of pleasure; and
even the very negroes, those holiday-loving rogues, gorgeously
arrayed in cast-off finery, collected in juntos, at corners, displaying their white teeth, and making the welkin ring with
bursts of laughter, loud enough to crack even the icy cheek of
old winter. There is something so pleasant in all this, that I
confess it would give me real pain, to behold the frigid influence
of modern style cheating us of this jubilee of the heart; and
converting it, as it does every other article of social intercourse,
into an idle and unmeaning ceremony.'Tis the annual festival of
good-humor; it comes in the dead of winter, when nature is
without a charm, when our pleasures are contracted to the fireside, and when everything that unlocks the icy fetters of the
heart, and sets the genial current flowing, should be cherished,
as a stray lamb found in the wilderness; or a flower blooming
among thorns and briers.
Animated by these sentiments, it is with peculiar satisfaction
I perceived that the last new-year was kept with more than ordinary enthusiasm. It seemed as if the good old times had rolled
back again, and brought with them all the honest, unceremonious intercourse of those golden days, when people were more
open and sincere, more moral and more hospitable than now;
when every object carried about it a charm which the hand of
time has stolen away, or turned to a deformity; when the
women were more simple, more domestic, more lovely, and more
true; and when even the sun, like a hearty old blade as he is,
shone with a genial lustre unknown in these degenerate daysin short, those fairy times when I was a madcap boy, crowding
every enjoyment into the present momlent; making of the past
an obliviol; of the future a heaven; and careless of all that