aper in the
Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know what
I shall find when it is opened.

Yes, my life is a little less precious to me since I have lost that dear
old friend; and when the funeral train moves to Westminster Abbey next
Saturday, for I feel as if this were 1784, and not 1884,--I seem to find
myself following the hearse, one of the silent mourners.

Among the events which have rendered the past year memorable to me
has been the demolition of that venerable and interesting old
dwelling-house, precious for its intimate association with the earliest
stages of the war of the Revolution, and sacred to me as my birthplace
and the home of my boyhood.

The "Old Gambrel-roofed House" exists no longer. I remember saying
something, in one of a series of papers published long ago, about the
experience of dying out of a house,--of leaving it forever, as the
soul dies out of the body. We may die out of many houses, but the house
itself can die but once; and so real is the life of a house to one who
has dwelt in it, more especially the life of the house which held him
in dreamy infancy, in restless boyhood, in passionate youth,--so real,
I say, is its life, that it seems as if something like a soul of it must
outlast its perishing frame.

The slaughter of the Old Gambrel-roofed House was, I am ready to admit,
a case of justifiable domicide. Not the less was it to be deplored
by all who love the memories of the past. With its destruction are
obliterated some of the footprints of the heroes and martyrs who took
the first steps in the long and bloody march which led us through the
wilderness to the promised land of independent nationality. Personally,
I have a right to mourn for it as a part of my life gone from me. My
private grief for its loss would be a matter for my solitary digestion,
were it not that the experience through which I have just passed is one
so familiar to my fellow-countrymen that, in telling my own reflections
and feelings, I am repeating those of great numbers of men and women who
have had the misfortune to outlive their birthplace.

It is a great blessing to be born surrounded by a natural horizon. The
Old Gambrel-roofed House could not boast an unbroken ring of natural
objects encircling it. Northerly it looked upon its own outbuildings and
some unpretending two-story houses which had been its neighbors for a
century and more. To the south of it the square brick dormit