By Euuaseru Perva, Souvenira! The very word has back the faint, ave old fashioned sound, musty fragrance of crumbling reste crumbling ropes! it reminds 2 loke "are penciled "with the broken in evidence "of tome much souvenira "atill survive?
One could hardly except to find them in Shanghai which is in a constant state of coming and going Even the most settled of our "old families" transplant thei-selves periodically]
to Pass over] strangers dur-Small chance of many' tender tokens lying in vender scented attics round Shang. hail Memories and assorted dreams do not go with the furnished houses offered for rent, All over the world there must be shrinkage in the stock Save in the case the landed aristocrat humanity at' large' is moving into smaller and' more compact houses.' The modern spartment offers no encouragement, for the collection and preservation of reminders of the past, however: ple ways many women have been known to dream and to grieve over a vanished past to the exclusion of all possible joy in the future. Many! whose hopes of ideal happiness died th those who fell on Flanders Fields do no service to the dead and defraud the living by lavishing all their affection upon fetishes of well worn letters from the front, some Photographs and medal The Gulf Between Now and Then But there was something to be suid for souvenirs, and we will avow, it even in this practical age. The rummaging youngster who was given permission to explore the trunks in the attic bridged the gulf between generations rapidly upon finding' that whi ind father was a dub at radio he had made some clectrical contrivances which were not s0 bad. The autograph albums or sentiment books" which our _mothers and aunts brought home from school or the letters which they sent back from the European tour which followed graduation showed them to have had more kindred exper-fences than we had hitherto dared suspect. We even obtained considerable kudos by translating their impressions into the slang of the moment and passing them along as our own.
But what a shock it was to us when we discovered a long string] of champagne corks and cigarettes! tied up with blue ribbon faded nearly chat What a frivolous white meerscreature our now sedate Harriet must have been! muses our Mother complacently. "Harriet was a great belle!" and she smiles cryptically as one who had not been without attention herself, tion should help us to be more tol-orant of the Youngest Set.
What will take the place of those funny scrap books, elaborately lettered and bulging with photographs, Programmes, telegrams, tickets, even gloves' or dog-collars?—How will our successors reconstruct the age in which we are living? Of course they will have the moving picture films by which we record our family festivals such as weddings or christenings, but they will hardly take the place of the pressed flowers or the silly letters that we somehow Have not the heart to tear up.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.