e off, and leave bald the boards
that supported them; shingles darken and decay, and soon the garret or
the attic lets in the rain and the snow; by and by the beams sag, the
floors warp, the walls crack, the paper peels away, the ceilings scale
off and fall, the windows are crusted with clinging dust, the doors drop
from their rusted hinges, the winds come in without knocking and howl
their cruel death-songs through the empty rooms and passages, and at last
there comes a crash, a great cloud of dust rises, and the home that had
been the shelter of generation after generation finds its grave in its
own cellar. Only the chimney remains as its monument. Slowly, little by
little, the patient solvents that find nothing too hard for their
chemistry pick out the mortar from between the bricks; at last a mighty
wind roars around it and rushes against it, and the monumental relic
crashes down among the wrecks it has long survived. So dies a human
habitation left to natural decay, all that was seen above the surface of
the soil sinking gradually below it,

Till naught remains the saddening tale to tell
Save home's last wrecks, the cellar and the well.

But if this sight is saddening, what is it to see a human dwelling fall
by the hand of violence! The ripping off of the shelter that has kept
out a thousand storms, the tearing off of the once ornamental woodwork,
the wrench of the inexorable crowbar, the murderous blows of the axe, the
progressive ruin, which ends by rending all the joints asunder and
flinging the tenoned and mortised timbers into heaps that will be sawed
and split to warm some new habitation as firewood,--what a brutal act of
destruction it seems!

Why should I go over the old house again, having already described it
more than ten years ago? Alas! how many remember anything they read but
once, and so long ago as that? How many would find it out if one should
say over in the same words that which he said in the last decade? But
there is really no need of telling the story a second time, for it can be
found by those who are curious enough to look it up in a volume of which
it occupies the opening chapter.

In order, however, to save any inquisitive reader that trouble, let me
remind him that the old house was General Ward's headquarters at the
breaking out of the Revolution; that the plan for fortifying Bunker's
Hill was laid, as commonly believed, in the southeast lower room, the
floor of which was cover