it may seem, an aerial hint of his personality in the far
distance always awakens in my mind pleasant remembrances and tender
reflections. A whole neighborhood rises up before me: the barn, with
its haymow, where the hens laid their eggs to hatch, and we boys hid our
apples to ripen, both occasionally illustrating the sic vos non vobis;
the shed, where the annual Tragedy of the Pig was acted with a realism
that made Salvini's Othello seem but a pale counterfeit; the rickety old
outhouse, with the "corn-chamber" which the mice knew so well; the paved
yard, with its open gutter,--these and how much else come up at the
hint of my far-off friend, who is my very near enemy. Nothing is more
familiar than the power of smell in reviving old memories. There was
that quite different fragrance of the wood-house, the smell of fresh
sawdust. It comes back to me now, and with it the hiss of the saw; the
tumble of the divorced logs which God put together and man has just put
asunder; the coming down of the axe and the hah! that helped it,--the
straight-grained stick opening at the first appeal of the implement as
if it were a pleasure, and the stick with a knot in the middle of it
that mocked the blows and the hahs! until the beetle and wedge made it
listen to reason,--there are just such straight-grained and just such
knotty men and women. All this passes through my mind while Biddy, whose
parlor-name is Angela, contents herself with exclaiming "egh!*******!"

How different distances were in those young days of which I am thinking!
From the old house to the old yellow meeting-house, where the head of
the family preached and the limbs of the family listened, was not much
more than two or three times the width of Commonwealth Avenue. But of
a hot summer's afternoon, after having already heard one sermon,
which could not in the nature of things have the charm of novelty of
presentation to the members of the home circle, and the theology of
which was not too clear to tender apprehensions; with three hymns more
or less lugubrious, rendered by a village-choir, got into voice by many
preliminary snuffles and other expiratory efforts, and accompanied by
the snort of a huge bassviol which wallowed through the tune like a
hippopotamus, with other exercises of the customary character,--after
all this in the forenoon, the afternoon walk to the meeting-house in the
hot sun counted for as much, in my childish dead-reckoning, as from old
Israel Port