we boys hid our
apples to ripen, both occasionally illustrating the sic vos non vobis;
the shed, where the annual Tragedy of the Pig was acted with a realism
that made Salvini's Othello seem but a pale counterfeit; the rickety old
outhouse, with the "corn-chamber" which the mice knew so well; the paved
yard, with its open gutter,--these and how much else come up at the hint
of my far-off friend, who is my very near enemy. Nothing is more
familiar than the power of smell in reviving old memories. There was that
quite different fragrance of the wood-house, the smell of fresh sawdust.
It comes back to me now, and with it the hiss of the saw; the tumble of
the divorced logs which God put together and man has just put asunder;
the coming down of the axe and the hah! that helped it,--the
straight-grained stick opening at the first appeal of the implement as if
it were a pleasure, and the stick with a knot in the middle of it that
mocked the blows and the hahs! until the beetle and wedge made it listen
to reason,--there are just such straight-grained and just such knotty men
and women. All this passes through my mind while Biddy, whose
parlor-name is Angela, contents herself with exclaiming "egh!*******!"

How different distances were in those young days of which I am thinking!
From the old house to the old yellow meeting-house, where the head of the
family preached and the limbs of the family listened, was not much more
than two or three times the width of Commonwealth Avenue. But of a hot
summer's afternoon, after having already heard one sermon, which could
not in the nature of things have the charm of novelty of presentation to
the members of the home circle, and the theology of which was not too
clear to tender apprehensions; with three hymns more or less lugubrious,
rendered by a village-choir, got into voice by many preliminary snuffles
and other expiratory efforts, and accompanied by the snort of a huge
bassviol which wallowed through the tune like a hippopotamus, with other
exercises of the customary character,--after all this in the forenoon,
the afternoon walk to the meeting-house in the hot sun counted for as
much, in my childish dead-reckoning, as from old Israel Porter's in
Cambridge to the Exchange Coffeehouse in Boston did in after years. It
takes a good while to measure the radius of the circle that is about us,
for the moon seems at first as near as the watchface. Who knows but
that, after a certain number of