Dipping into History

JUST now I am trying, for my private edification, and also because of an allotted task, to retire into the past about a quarter of a century. That is not far back. I was alive then, and most likely very interested in life. It struck me, as soon as I decided to go back to see how things looked then, that it could be done as easily as just turning over the memory in regular leaves. Yet I had not turned back far before I was lost; the years seemed mostly alike; there was but a grey and vacant expanse with apparently few outstanding features in it.