I looked round on the black-walnut chairs and bedstead
and bureau. "Make me a large and handsomely wrought gilded handle to
the key of that dark chest of drawers," I said to the furnisher. It
was done, and that one luminous point redeemed the sombre apartment
as the evening star glorifies the dusky firmament. So, my loving
reader,--and to none other can such table-talk as this be addressed,
--I hope there will be lustre enough in one or other of the names with
which I shall gild my page to redeem the dulness of all that is
merely personal in my recollections.

After leaving the school of Dame Prentiss, best remembered by infantine
loves, those pretty preludes of more serious passions; by the great
forfeit-basket, filled with its miscellaneous waifs and deodauds, and by
the long willow stick by the aid of which the good old body, now stricken
in years and unwieldy in person could stimulate the sluggish faculties or
check the mischievous sallies of the child most distant from his ample
chair,--a school where I think my most noted schoolmate was the present
Bishop of Delaware, became the pupil of Master William Biglow. This
generation is not familiar with his title to renown, although he fills
three columns and a half in Mr. Duyckinck's "Cyclopaedia of American
Literature." He was a humorist hardly robust enough for more than a
brief local immortality. I am afraid we were an undistinguished set, for
I do not remember anybody near a bishop in dignity graduating from our
benches.

At about ten years of age I began going to what we always called the
"Port School," because it was kept at Cambridgeport, a mile from the
College. This suburb was at that time thinly inhabited, and, being much
of it marshy and imperfectly reclaimed, had a dreary look as compared
with the thriving College settlement. The tenants of the many beautiful
mansions that have sprung up along Main Street, Harvard Street, and
Broadway can hardly recall the time when, except the "Dana House" and the
"Opposition House" and the "Clark House," these roads were almost all the
way bordered by pastures until we reached the "stores" of Main Street, or
were abreast of that forlorn "First Row" of Harvard Street. We called
the boys of that locality "Port-chucks." They called us
"Cambridge-chucks," but we got along very well together in the main.

Among my schoolmates at the Port School was a young girl of singular
loveliness. I once before referred to her as