Nevada County picayune., 1890-03-12
ABOUT ALTERNATING.
An Old Fashion That Is Rapidly Bccou
 ing Obsolete in Our Country.

An Old Fashion That Is Rapidly Bccom-
 ing Obsolete in Our Country.
 It is often enough said that the old fashion of writing letters, which con sisted of keeping one eye upon the effect likely to be produced upon the person to whom the epistle was addressed and one upon the effect to be wrought upon the public when the correspondence should ultimately be published, has vanished from the face of the earth If anybody wishes to address the public nowadays he does it at first hand by writing some thing and getting it into print immedi- ately, or he sits down in cold blood to write journal, with the express inten- tion of having it posthumously printed. We are frankcr than people were in the generations behind us, and if this frank ness is largely the result of cynicism, 1t still has it's redecmng features and seems far more manly and less mawkish than the sentimentality which preceded it."
 But it is not alone this sort of letter. writing which has gone out of vogue The family letter, which was full of family news, of domestic details, of harmless gossip, has gone out of fashion also. It was not written for publication and to a certain extent the responsible ity for it's disappearance rests upon the newspapers which report every thing that is worth attention and a good deal that is not. The supposition is that if anybody cares to keep run of things of this order he will take the trouble to look in the newspapers for the informa- tOn he seeks, and it is therefore idle to waste time in putting them down upon the pages of a private letter. It is more over true that family ties are less looso than they were of old. When, in the days of our fathers. young man went away from home he was apt to feel that he still belonged to the old circles: or at least he took an interest in the doing of the folk he had left behind him. He was expected to, and that in itself counted for a good deal. Now in the in- crease of worldly wisdom, it is assumed that the youth who goes from home leaves the old behind him and identifies himself with the new; a theory which under modern conditions, is generally necessarily true. It follows that he does not manifest interest in his old as- sociates to any marked degree, and as consequence it is of no especial uso to write the Dews to him.
 The decline of letter writing goes even father than this, however. It is rapidly getting to be the habit of our people not to write letters of any sort save the cpistlcs which are indispens. able in business, and these are not only rendered far less numerous than of old by the use of telegraph and telephone, but when unavoidable are largely given over to the stcnographcr and the type writer. Among literary people letter. writing is perhaps more nearly extinct than anywhere else: so that one won dors how in the world the biographer of the future is to fill out his volumes, and what he will find to take the place of the voluminous correspondence which makes up the bulk of so many biOgra phies. The formal notes of courtesy still obtain, but it is impossible to be sure. that in few years more it will not be allowable to have engraved forms for these as one does for his visiting card. and to send neat printed slip in reply to invitations. The postal card had it's effect At first many people used it little because of it's conven- fence; then they abandoned it because of it's vulgarity, and of course could not bring themselves to return to the more laborious note after having become ac- customod to this labor-saving contriv- ance. People telegraph to their friends now, and it is not certain that even love- letters are not superseded by the yellow blanks of the companies. Perhaps in the near future science will realize the old fancy of magic contrivance which enables distant friends to communicate with one another, no matter where they may be; but, in the meantime, the letter goes more and more out of use, until thcro seems not little danger that it will vanish altogether, and leave us with no means of bridging space between parted friends save the unscntimcntal and proSair telegraph or telephone.-