andsome grounds, the distant and mysterious grove, the rotund
horse-chestnut trees, venerable and solemn, nearly a century old--to
this day a horse-chestnut always seems to me like a theological
trustee--and the sweep of playground so vast, so soft, so green,
so fragrant, so clean, that the baby cockney ran imperiously to her
father and demanded that he go build her a brick sidewalk to play
upon.

What, I wonder, may be the earliest act of memory on record? Mine is
not at all unusual--dating only to two and a half years; at which time
I clearly remember being knocked down by my dog, in my father's area
in Boston, and being crowed over by a rooster of abnormal proportions
who towered between me and the sky, a dragon in size and capabilities.

My father always maintained that he distinctly remembered hearing the
death of Napoleon announced in his presence when he was one year and a
half old.

Is the humiliating difference between the instinctive selection of
Napoleon and that of the rooster, one of temperament or sex? In either
case, it is significant enough to lead one to drop the subject.

Next to having been born in a university town, comes the advantage--if
it be an advantage--of having spent one's youth there. Mr. Howells
says that he must be a dull fellow who does not, at some time or
other, hate his native village; and I must confess that I have not, at
all stages of my life, held my present opinion of Andover. There have
been times when her gentle indifference to the preoccupations of the
world has stung me, as all serenity stings restlessness. There have
been times when the inevitable limitations of her horizon have seemed
as familiar as the coffin-lid to the dead.

[Illustration: PROFESSOR AUSTIN PHELPS'S STUDY.

Drawn from a photograph taken after Professor Phelps's death, when the
study had been somewhat dismantled.]

There was an epoch when her theology--But, nevertheless, I certainly
look back upon Andover Hill with a very gentle pleasure and heartfelt
sense of debt.

It has been particularly asked of me to give some form to my
recollections of a phase of local life which is now so obviously
passing away that it has a certain historical interest.

That Andover remains upon the map of Massachusetts yet, one does not
dispute; but the Andover of New England theology--the Andover of a
peculiar people, the Andover that held herself apart from the world
and all that was therein--will soon become an inte