a-sickness and home-sickness are hard to deal with by any remedy but
time. Mine was not a bad case, but it excited sympathy. There was an
ancient, faded old lady in the house, very kindly, but very deaf,
rustling about in dark autumnal foliage of silk or other murmurous
fabric, somewhat given to snuff, but a very worthy gentlewoman of the
poor-relation variety. She comforted me, I well remember, but not with
apples, and stayed me, but not with flagons. She went in her benevolence,
and, taking a blue and white soda-powder, mingled the same in water, and
encouraged me to drink the result. It might be a specific for
seasickness, but it was not for home-sickness. The fiz was a mockery,
and the saline refrigerant struck a colder chill to my despondent heart.
I did not disgrace myself, however, and a few days cured me, as a week on
the water often cures seasickness.

There was a sober-faced boy of minute dimensions in the house, who began
to make some advances to me, and who, in spite of all the conditions
surrounding him, turned out, on better acquaintance, to be one of the
most amusing, free-spoken, mocking little imps I ever met in my life. My
room-mate came later. He was the son of a clergyman in a neighboring
town,--in fact I may remark that I knew a good many clergymen's sons at
Andover. He and I went in harness together as well as most boys do, I
suspect; and I have no grudge against him, except that once, when I was
slightly indisposed, he administered to me,--with the best intentions, no
doubt,--a dose of Indian pills, which effectually knocked me out of time,
as Mr. Morrissey would say,--not quite into eternity, but so near it
that I perfectly remember one of the good ladies told me (after I had
come to my senses a little, and was just ready for a sip of cordial and a
word of encouragement), with that delightful plainness of speech which so
brings realities home to the imagination, that "I never should look any
whiter when I was laid out as a corpse." After my room-mate and I had
been separated twenty-five years, fate made us fellow-townsmen and
acquaintances once more in Berkshire, and now again we are close literary
neighbors; for I have just read a very pleasant article, signed by him,
in the last number of the "Galaxy." Does it not sometimes seem as if we
were all marching round and round in a circle, like the supernumeraries
who constitute the "army" of a theatre, and that each of us meets and is
met