y the
observations of the lad,--to recall early incidents, revisit remembered
scenes, return on old feelings, and see who were dead and who were alive
among the casual acquaintances of nearly a quarter of a century ago. The
morning of Wednesday rose dark with fog and rain, but the wind had
fallen; and as I could not afford to miss seeing Conon-side, I sallied
out under cover of an umbrella. I crossed the bridge, and reached the
pleasure-grounds of Conon-house. The river was big in flood: it was
exactly such a river Conon as I had lost sight of in the winter of 1821;
and I had to give up all hope of wading into its fords, as I used to do
early in the autumn of that year, and pick up the pearl muscles that lie
so thickly among the stones at the bottom. I saw, however, amid a
thicket of bushes by the river-side, a heap of broken shells, where some
herd-boy had been carrying on such a pearl fishery as I had sometimes
used to carry on in my own behalf so long before; and I felt it was just
something to see it. The flood eddied past, dark and heavy, sweeping
over bulwark and bank. The low-stemmed alders that rose on islet and
mound seemed shorn of half their trunks in the tide; here and there an
elastic branch bent to the current, and rose and bent again; and now a
tuft of withered heath came floating down, and now a soiled wreath of
foam. How vividly the past rose up before me!--boyish day-dreams
forgotten for twenty years,--the fossils of an early formation of mind,
produced at a period when the atmosphere of feeling was warmer than now,
and the immaturities of the mental kingdom grew rank and large, like the
ancient Cryptogamiae, and bore no specific resemblance to the productions
of a present time. I had passed in the neighborhood the first season I
anywhere spent among strangers, at an age when home is not a country,
nor a province even, but simply a little spot of earth inhabited by
friends and relatives; and the rude verses, long forgotten, in which my
joy had found vent when on the eve of returning to that home,--a home
little more than twenty miles away,--came chiming as freshly into my
memory as if scarce a month had passed since I had composed them beside
the Conon.[6]

Three-and-twenty years form a large portion of the short life of
man,--one-third, as nearly as can be expressed in unbroken numbers, of
the entire term fixed by the psalmist, and full one-half, if we strike
off the twilight periods of childhood and