Holmes, who confessed that he
would willingly have stayed from morning till night viewing their
delights, and declared that the sound of the tent-raising on the
Common the night before the show began could be compared to nothing
but the evening before Agincourt!

Holmes was born in August, when, he tells us in one of his charming
essays, the meadows around Cambridge were brilliant with the cardinal
flower, and blossoming buckwheat covered the fields, while the
bayberry, barberry, sweetfern, and huckleberry made delightful
retreats for the small boy of the neighborhood. In the same essay
he describes the old garden of the parsonage, with its lilac-bushes,
hyacinths, tulips, peonies, and hollyhocks, its peaches, nectarines,
and white grapes, growing in friendly companionship with the beets,
carrots, onions, and squashes, while the old pear-tree in the corner,
called by Holmes "the moral pear-tree," because its fruit never
ripened, taught him one of his earliest lessons. Bits of reminiscence
like this scattered throughout the pages of Holmes enable us to
reconstruct the scenes of his youth and to follow him from the time
he was afraid of the masts of the sloops down by the bridge, "being a
very young child," through all the years of his boyhood. The parsonage
was an old-fashioned gambrel-roofed house, which Holmes recurs to
again and again with loving remembrance. The rooms were large and
light and had been the scenes of stirring events in other days.

On the study floor could still be seen the dents of the muskets
stacked there in Revolutionary times, and an old family portrait in
one of the upper rooms still bore the sword-thrusts of the British
soldiers. A certain dark store-room contained a pile of tables and
chairs, which to the child's fancy seemed to have rushed in there to
hide, and tumbled against one another as people do when frightened.
Another store-room held an array of preserve-jars containing delicious
sweets; before the door of this room he would stand with one eye
glued to the keyhole while his childish imagination revelled in the
forbidden luxuries.

The house had also a ghostly garret about which clustered many
legends, and these in connection with certain patches of sand bare of
grass and vine and called the Devil's Footsteps, which might have been
seen around the neighborhood, tended to make the bedtime hour a season
of dread to the imaginative boy, who saw shadowy red-coats in every
dark corner,