Strona:Jerome K. Jerome - Trzej ludzie w jednej łodzi.djvu/74

 Then on the breaking-up day, we caught colds, and whooping cough, and all kinds of disorders, which lasted till the term recommenced; when in spite of everything we could manoeuvre to the contrary, we would get suddenly well again, and be better than ever.
 Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked.
 To go back to the carved-oak question, they must have had very fair notions of the artistic and the beautiful, our great-great-grandfathers. Why, all our arttreasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago.
 I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes.
 The „old blue“ that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common everyday household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
 Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above