ittle out
of the common incidents of humanity. No eminent sons have as yet
remembered it with noble benefactions. It has had no poet and no mention
in literature. The reporters pass it by. It is not even a suburb, last
sad fate of many towns and villages. This is one of the reasons for my
attachment--its unchangeableness, its entire satisfaction of sentiment.

Yet such is the charm of one's native soil that he is able to find in it
the most wonderful of all the beautiful things of the soul, namely,
those which no one else can see or believe. After long years of absence,
on returning to Bellingham, my memory sees more than my eyes. She who
accompanies me in my rambles over the town often takes photographs of
the places dearest to me; but her pictures show not what I behold, and
she wonders what it can be that so infatuates me. I see a hand she
cannot see--forms, faces, happenings not registered on the camera;
places where linger the invisible spirits of joyful or painful
experiences; playmates, companions, whole families now dust, a thousand
events recalled only when time begins to obliterate those of the present
moment.

Although the sun went down over venerable Mendon town, it lingered
longer over Bellingham in summer days than in any place I have known.
There was hardly any night; just a few attic stairs, a dream, and the
sun and I were again at play. Nor elsewhere were ever the summer clouds
so high, so near the blue, so impetuous in the constant west wind to
follow each other into the unknown, mysterious east.

Fortunate is the town with a river flowing through its whole length and
boys and girls to accompany its unhasting waters. It was made for them,
also for the little fish and the white scented lilies. For a few hours
of the day the great floats of the mill wheel drank of it, sending it
onward in the only agitation it ever permitted itself. Then there was
Bear Hill, though never a bear in the oldest memory, yet the name was
ominous to children. I feared it and liked to visualize its terrors from
a safe distance in the blackberry field behind the Red House. To kill a
bear or an Indian was the very limit of imaginative prowess. It was too
easy, and in an hour, tiresome, to kill birds, snakes and anything one
chanced upon that had life. Only the grasshopper could escape with the
ransom of some molasses from the jug he carries hidden, no one knows
where. You never knew a grasshopper was provisioned with a molasses