our left upon the Old Road you saw some half dozen dignified old
houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward." One
of these, the largest and most stately, was the Craigie House, famous
as the headquarters of Washington in 1776, and afterwards as the home
of Longfellow. And at the end of the New Road toward Cambridge was a
row of six fine willows, which had remained from the stockade built in
early days as a defense against the Indians.

And here is Harvard Square, where stand the buildings of the famous
college:

"A few houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare Common, with ample
elbow-room, and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through
the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy's artillery
rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia
general who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. People
still lived who regretted the unhappy separation from the mother
island. . . The hooks were to be seen from which swung the hammocks of
Burgoyne's captive redcoats. If memory does not deceive me, women
still washed clothes in the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia.
Commencement had not ceased to be the great holiday of the Puritan
Commonwealth, and a fitting one it was--the festival of Santa
Scholastica, whose triumphal path one may conceive strewn with leaves
of spelling-books instead of bay."

James was the youngest of four brothers and two sisters, a handsome
boy, and his mother's darling. He always thought he inherited his love
of nature and poetic aspirations from her, whose family was from the
Orkneys--those islands at the extreme north of Scotland.

His father was a strikingly handsome man, gracious and of rare
personal qualities, and a faithful pastor over his flock. Often he
took his youngest son on long drives with him, when he went to
exchange pulpits with neighboring clergymen. Because of his wide
family connection, and his father's position, James saw not a little
of New England society as it was in those days, pure Yankee through
and through.

CHAPTER II

AN IMPETUOUS YOUNG MAN

Young James was sent first to a dame school, as a private school for
very small children kept by a lady in her own house was called in
those days. But when he was eight or nine he was sent to a boarding
school near Elmwood--going, of course, only as a day scholar. This
school was kept by an Englishman named Wells, who had belonged to a
publishin