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