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and with every unfamiliar noise expected even more uncanny visitors. Outside was the old garden, sweet and sunny, and close to it the friendly wall of a neighbor's house, up which climbed a honeysuckle which stretched so far back into memory that the child thought it had been there always, "like the sky and stars," and on the whole the atmosphere of the old home was most wholesome. When Holmes was but a little child he was sent to Dame Prentice's school, where he studied the primer and spent his leisure moments in falling in love with his pretty girl schoolmates or playing with certain boyish toys which were always confiscated sooner or later by the school-mistress, and went to help fill a large basket which stood ready to receive such treasures. At ten years of age he began attendance at the Cambridgeport school, where he had for schoolmates Margaret Fuller and Richard Henry Dana, and where he remained for some years. Holmes says that in these years of his childhood every possible occasion for getting a crowd together was made the most of--school anniversaries and town centennials; Election Day, which came in May, when everyone carried a bunch of lilacs and the small boys ate "election buns" of such size that the three regular meals had to be omitted; Fourth of July, a very grand holiday indeed, when the festivities were opened by the Governor; Commencement Week, with its glories of shows and dancing on the Common, were each in turn made seasons of joy for the youthful denizens of Cambridge and Boston. Perhaps the most gratifying of all the holidays was the old-fashioned Thanksgiving, when even the sermon, though of greater length than usual, "had a subdued cheerfulness running through it," which kept reminding the children of the turkey and oyster-sauce, the plum-pudding, pumpkin-pie, oranges, almonds, and shagbarks awaiting them at home, and the chink of the coin in the contribution-boxes was but a joyous prelude to the music of roasting apples and nuts. Holmes left the Cambridgeport school to enter Phillips Academy, and has left us a charming account of this first visit to Andover, whither he went in a carriage with his parents, becoming more and more homesick as the time came for parting, until finally he quite broke down and for a few days was utterly miserable. But he had happy days at Andover, and revisiting the place in after years he describes himself as followed by the little ghost of himself, who we
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