villages seem to
change very slowly. Once in a hundred years the library burns down with
all its books. A new edifice or two may be put up, and a new library
begun in the course of the same century; but these places are poor, for
the most part, and cannot afford to pull down their old barracks.

These sentimental journeys to old haunts must be made alone. The story
of them must be told succinctly. It is like the opium-smoker's showing
you the pipe from which he has just inhaled elysian bliss, empty of the
precious extract which has given him his dream.

I did not care much for the new Academy building on my right, nor for the
new library building on my left. But for these it was surprising to see
how little the scene I remembered in my boyhood had changed. The
Professors' houses looked just as they used to, and the stage-coach
landed its passengers at the Mansion House as of old. The pale brick
seminary buildings were behind me on the left, looking as if "Hollis" and
"Stoughton" had been transplanted from Cambridge,--carried there in the
night by orthodox angels, perhaps, like the Santa Casa. Away to my left
again, but abreast of me, was the bleak, bare old Academy building; and
in front of me stood unchanged the shallow oblong white house where I
lived a year in the days of James Monroe and of John Quincy Adams.

The ghost of a boy was at my side as I wandered among the places he knew
so well. I went to the front of the house. There was the great rock
showing its broad back in the front yard. I used to crack nuts on that,
whispered the small ghost. I looked in at the upper window in the
farther part of the house. I looked out of that on four long changing
seasons, said the ghost. I should have liked to explore farther, but,
while I was looking, one came into the small garden, or what used to be
the garden, in front of the house, and I desisted from my investigation
and went on my way. The apparition that put me and my little ghost to
flight had a dressing-gown on its person and a gun in its hand. I think
it was the dressing-gown, and not the gun, which drove me off.

And now here is the shop, or store, that used to be Shipman's, after
passing what I think used to be Jonathan Leavitt's bookbindery, and here
is the back road that will lead me round by the old Academy building.

Could I believe my senses when I found that it was turned into a
gymnasium, and heard the low thunder of ninepin balls, and the