LETTER WRITING.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 95, 7 September 1912, Page 2 (Supplement)

LETTER WRITING.

USED TO BE CONSIDERED QUITE A PASTIME. • ''Do you know, I just hate to write letters?" —Familiar Quotation No. 3450. Who does like to write letters, anyway? No one but the very young person in love, or who thinks he is. Most of us telephone if we can, and if we can't telephone we wait for a few days and then forget all about it. Grandma used to write letters as long as an old-fashioned sermon. Grandpa was a right pert letter-writer, too. Everybody wrote 'em. It was the thing to do, and you got yourself disliked if you did not sit down every once in a while, sharpen your goosequill, and tell somebody all your inmost thoughts and what you had for dinner. We'quit it some time back. It is doubtful now if there is more than one person ill ten who has the faintest glimmerings of what a real old-fashioned chatty letter was like. They called them epistles back in grandm-rs time, and they spent whole days writing them, copying them, and sealing them with a multitude of red, green and blue seals. If it were not for young lovers and old folks the letter as it used to be would just about vanish. The rest of us have no time in which to sit clown and lay bare the very secrets of our inner souls on a white page. Lovers will doubtless always write letters. It is in their blood, and it refuses to yield to new conditions. Anyway, there is a certain amount of mushiness in the system that must be got rid of, and this is the most effective way. & 'The business letter is hardly a letter. It is more nearly an insult when you try to look at it'as anything but a cold and crisp business memorandum. Even the so-called letter that passes between friends is hardly more than a greeting and a good-bye. The post card is partly to blame. Folks have grown used to buying a chromo-card, writing a -brief sentence thereon, and insulting the absent ones in that manner. Two hundred years ago, when you wrote a letter, you made of it a sort of a newspaper, a diary, and a sermon all rolled into one. They spent a few hours daily on it, they polished the sentences and looked up all the hard words in the dictionary. When it was done it was a complex tiling that was worth keeping and studying. Postage was high in those times, and the mails were more uncertain than the weather, and .when they wrote they wanted to be sure and get it all in the epistle. Letters were real events, whether you Bent them or received them.— St. Louis Republic.