tening to the gaseous praises of this or that fantastic
system, that I found in the pleasing mirages conjured up for me by the
ragged old volume I used to pore over in the southeast attic-chamber.

The rooms of the second story, the chambers of birth and death, are
sacred to silent memories.

Let us go down to the ground-floor. I should have begun with this, but
that the historical reminiscences of the old house have been recently
told in a most interesting memoir by a distinguished student of our local
history. I retain my doubts about those "dents" on the floor of the
right-hand room, "the study" of successive occupants, said to have been
made by the butts of the Continental militia's firelocks, but this was
the cause to which the story told me in childhood laid them. That
military consultations were held in that room when the house was General
Ward's headquarters, that the Provincial generals and colonels and other
men of war there planned the movement which ended in the fortifying of
Bunker's Hill, that Warren slept in the house the night before the
battle, that President Langdon went forth from the western door and
prayed for God's blessing on the men just setting forth on their bloody
expedition,--all these things have been told, and perhaps none of them
need be doubted.

But now for fifty years and more that room has been a meeting-ground for
the platoons and companies which range themselves at the scholar's word
of command. Pleasant it is to think that the retreating host of books is
to give place to a still larger army of volumes, which have seen service
under the eye of a great commander. For here the noble collection of him
so freshly remembered as our silver-tongued orator, our erudite scholar,
our honored College President, our accomplished statesman, our courtly
ambassador, are to be reverently gathered by the heir of his name,
himself not unworthy to be surrounded by that august assembly of the wise
of all ages and of various lands and languages.

Could such a many-chambered edifice have stood a century and a half and
not have had its passages of romance to bequeath their lingering legends
to the after-time? There are other names on some of the small
window-panes, which must have had young flesh-and-blood owners, and there
is one of early date which elderly persons have whispered was borne by a
fair woman, whose graces made the house beautiful in the eyes of the
youth of that time. One especially