BOSTON New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street HARVARD LIBRARY 50 * 71 Copyright, 1858, 1864, and 1982, The Riverside Press, Cambridge : OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. TWENTY-FIVE years more have passed since the silence of the preceding twenty-five years was broken by the first words of the self-recording personage who lends his title to these pages, in the “ Atlantic Monthly” for November, 1857. The children of those who first read these papers as they appeared are still reading them as kindly as their fathers and mothers read them a quarter of a century ago. And now, for the first time for many years, I have read them myself, thinking that they might be improved by various corrections and changes. But it is dangerous to tamper in cold blood and in after life with what was written in the glow of an earlier period. Its very defects are a part of its organic individuality. It would spoil any character these records may have to attempt to adjust them to the present age of the world or of the author. We have all of us, |