The following unexpected paragraph appeared in the January 2, 1914, issue of the Windsor Locks Journal, the first issue of that new year. The paragraph was located in the West Suffield news column, sandwiched smoothly between a typical report on the death and funeral of Mrs. Ella A. Griffin and a comment that Mrs. William H. Nelson had given an “at home” to her Suffield friends Tuesday afternoon.
The sentiments expressed in this old paragraph seem to this historian/reporter to be surprisingly unorthodox for Suffield at that time – though perhaps not so much for a farmer. One can wonder who the WLJ’s West Suffield correspondent was in 1914.
In presenting a welcome to 1914 we are reminded that we are but dust; motes in the sunbeam of the infinite. We cling like oysters to our little point in the bed of the vast ocean of mystery; all about us is Nature, her mind a galaxy of secrets, her thoughts far and strange as the procession of the sun; nothing befits us, her children, so much as reverence for her purposes, humility before her great brain, trust and love in her vast heart.