CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 



MARRIED LIFE 



ON our wedding journey we went first to Boston, where we stayed 

 three days. It was bitterly cold and, after our arrival, there was a 

 tremendous fall of snow, through which we waded to the theatre and 

 saw Irving and Terry in Charles I, a foolish play, but the acting was 

 wonderful. From Boston we went to Montreal, Toronto, Niagara, Buf- 

 falo and Pittsburgh, spending Sunday with my oldest brother and 

 reaching Princeton early on Christmas morning. For all that journey, 

 nearly seven hundred miles in east-west distance, we never changed our 

 watches. It was the first considerable trip that either of us had made 

 under the newly adopted system of standard time; before that, every 

 town had its own "sun time" and railroad timetables were in the direst 

 confusion. Those of the Pennsylvania, for instance, bore a caption to 

 this effect: "The time here given is that of Philadelphia, which is five 

 minutes slower than that of New York." 



The new plan, like all innovations, encountered much opposition 

 and some cities tried to have both "railroad time" and "local time." 

 There were some well founded objections, especially in certain large 

 cities which, like Buffalo and Pittsburgh, were on the borders of the 

 time-belts and, in them, serious inconvenience was actually caused by 

 the new system. A few "rectifications of frontier," however, removed 

 most of the inconvenient features and "standard time" has become 

 so much a matter of course, that many people believe the system to 

 be of immemorial antiquity and some go so far as to attribute a divine 

 origin to it. Among the many objections which were raised to the plan 

 of daylight saving, which we adopted from England and France on 

 entering the World War, I saw several which denounced it as blas- 

 phemous, as a wanton and wicked departure from "God's own sun 

 time," conveniently ignoring the fact that this divinely appointed sys- 

 tem was not introduced until 1883. 



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