ted with the other
boarders, some of whom seem to me worth studying and describing. I have
something else of a graver character for my readers. I am talking, you
know, as a poet; I do not say I deserve the name, but I have taken
it, and if you consider me at all it must be in that aspect. You will,
therefore, be willing to run your eyes over a few pages read, of course
by request, to a select party of the boarders.

THE GAMBREL-ROOFED HOUSE AND ITS OUTLOOK.

A PANORAMA, WITH SIDE-SHOWS.

My birthplace, the home of my childhood and earlier and later boyhood,
has within a few months passed out of the ownership of my family into
the hands of that venerable Alma Mater who seems to have renewed her
youth, and has certainly repainted her dormitories. In truth, when I
last revisited that familiar scene and looked upon the flammantia mania
of the old halls, "Massachusetts" with the dummy clock-dial, "Harvard"
with the garrulous belfry, little "Holden" with the sculptured
unpunishable cherub over its portal, and the rest of my early
brick-and-mortar acquaintances, I could not help saying to myself that
I had lived to see the peaceable establishment of the Red Republic of
Letters.

Many of the things I shall put down I have no doubt told before in a
fragmentary way, how many I cannot be quite sure, as I do not very often
read my own prose works. But when a man dies a great deal is said of him
which has often been said in other forms, and now this dear old house
is dead to me in one sense, and I want to gather up my recollections and
wind a string of narrative round them, tying them up like a nosegay
for the last tribute: the same blossoms in it I have often laid on its
threshold while it was still living for me.

We Americans are all cuckoos,--we make our homes in the nests of other
birds. I have read somewhere that the lineal descendants of the man
who carted off the body of William Rufus, with Walter Tyrrel's arrow
sticking in it, have driven a cart (not absolutely the same one,
I suppose) in the New Forest, from that day to this. I don't quite
understand Mr. Ruskin's saying (if he said it) that he couldn't get
along in a country where there were no castles, but I do think we lose
a great deal in living where there are so few permanent homes. You will
see how much I parted with which was not reckoned in the price paid for
the old homestead.

I shall say many things which an uncharitable reader mi