riting once more--after an exclamation in strong English of the
older pattern,--

"Whether 't is nobler--nobler--nobler--"

To do what? O these women! these women! to have puddings or flapjacks!
Oh!--

"Whether 't is nobler--in the mind--to suffer
The slings--and arrows--of--"

Oh! Oh! these women! I will e'en step over to the parson's and have a
cup of sack with His Reverence for methinks Master Hamlet hath forgot
that which was just now on his lips to speak.

So I shall have to put off making my friends acquainted with the other
boarders, some of whom seem to me worth studying and describing. I have
something else of a graver character for my readers. I am talking, you
know, as a poet; I do not say I deserve the name, but I have taken it,
and if you consider me at all it must be in that aspect. You will,
therefore, be willing to run your eyes over a few pages read, of course
by request, to a select party of the boarders.

THE GAMBREL-ROOFED HOUSE AND ITS OUTLOOK.

A PANORAMA, WITH SIDE-SHOWS.

My birthplace, the home of my childhood and earlier and later boyhood,
has within a few months passed out of the ownership of my family into the
hands of that venerable Alma Mater who seems to have renewed her youth,
and has certainly repainted her dormitories. In truth, when I last
revisited that familiar scene and looked upon the flammantia mania of the
old halls, "Massachusetts" with the dummy clock-dial, "Harvard" with the
garrulous belfry, little "Holden" with the sculptured unpunishable cherub
over its portal, and the rest of my early brick-and-mortar acquaintances,
I could not help saying to myself that I had lived to see the peaceable
establishment of the Red Republic of Letters.

Many of the things I shall put down I have no doubt told before in a
fragmentary way, how many I cannot be quite sure, as I do not very often
read my own prose works. But when a man dies a great deal is said of him
which has often been said in other forms, and now this dear old house is
dead to me in one sense, and I want to gather up my recollections and
wind a string of narrative round them, tying them up like a nosegay for
the last tribute: the same blossoms in it I have often laid on its
threshold while it was still living for me.

We Americans are all cuckoos,--we make our homes in the nests of other
birds. I have read somewhere that the lineal descendants of the man who
carted of