poor, mean, sour, and uninteresting; and on the
west by the Common, not then disgraced by jealous enclosures, which
make it look like a cattle-market. Beyond, as I looked round, were
the Colleges, the meeting-house, the little square market-house, long
vanished; the burial-ground where the dead Presidents stretched their
weary bones under epitaphs stretched out at as full length as their
subjects; the pretty church where the gouty Tories used to kneel on
their hassocks; the district schoolhouse, and hard by it Ma'am Hancock's
cottage, never so called in those days, but rather "tenfooter"; then
houses scattered near and far, open spaces, the shadowy elms, round
hilltops in the distance, and over all the great bowl of the sky. Mind
you, this was the WORLD, as I first knew it; terra veteribus cognita, as
Mr. Arrowsmith would have called it, if he had mapped the universe of my
infancy:

But I am forgetting the old house again in the landscape. The worst of
a modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts. I watched
one building not long since. It had no proper garret, to begin with,
only a sealed interval between the roof and attics, where a spirit could
not be accommodated, unless it were flattened out like Ravel, Brother,
after the millstone had fallen on him. There was not a nook or a corner
in the whole horse fit to lodge any respectable ghost, for every part
was as open to observation as a literary man's character and condition,
his figure and estate, his coat and his countenance, are to his (or her)
Bohemian Majesty on a tour of inspection through his (or her) subjects'
keyholes.

Now the old house had wainscots, behind which the mice were always
scampering and squeaking and rattling down the plaster, and enacting
family scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar where the cold
slug clung to the walls, and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the
garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long white
potato-shoots went feeling along the floor, if haply they might find
the daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat with
holding up the burden they had been aching under day and night far a
century and more; it had sepulchral arches closed by rough doors that
hung on hinges rotten with rust, behind which doors, if there was not
a heap of bones connected with a mysterious disappearance of long ago,
there well might have been, for it was just the place to look for them.
It h