ked 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 "the golden blo