int. On that I found scratched; as with a nail or fork, the
following inscription:

E PE

Only that and nothing more, but the story told itself. Master Edward
Pearson, then about as high as the lock, was disposed to immortalize
himself in monumental brass, and had got so far towards it, when a
sudden interruption, probably a smart box on the ear, cheated him of his
fame, except so far as this poor record may rescue it. Dead long ago. I
remember him well, a grown man, as a visitor at a later period; and,
for some reason, I recall him in the attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes,
standing full before a generous wood-fire, not facing it, but quite the
contrary, a perfect picture of the content afforded by a blazing hearth
contemplated from that point of view, and, as the heat stole through
his person and kindled his emphatic features, seeming to me a pattern of
manly beauty. What a statue gallery of posturing friends we all have in
our memory! The old Professor himself sometimes visited the house after
it had changed hands. Of course, my recollections are not to be wholly
trusted, but I always think I see his likeness in a profile face to be
found among the illustrations of Rees's Cyclopaedia. (See Plates, Vol.
IV., Plate 2, Painting, Diversities of the Human Face, Fig. 4.)

And now let us return to our chief picture. In the days of my earliest
remembrance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars mounted guard on the western
side of the old mansion. Whether, like the cypress, these trees suggest
the idea of the funeral torch or the monumental spire, whether their
tremulous leaves make wits afraid by sympathy with their nervous
thrills, whether the faint balsamic smell of their foliage and their
closely swathed limbs have in them vague hints of dead Pharaohs
stiffened in their cerements, I will guess; but they always seemed to
me to give an of sepulchral sadness to the house before which stood
sentries. Not so with the row of elms which you may see leading up
towards the western entrance. I think the patriarch of them all went
over in the great gale of 1815; I know I used to shake the youngest of
them with my hands, stout as it is now, with a trunk that would defy the
bully of Crotona, or the strong man whose liaison with the Lady Delilah
proved so disastrous.

The College plain would be nothing without its elms. As the long hair of
a woman is a glory to her, are these green tresses that bank themselves
aga