un, and popped at everything that
stirred, pretty nearly, except the house-cat. Worse than this, I would
buy a cigar and smoke it by instalments, putting it meantime in the
barrel of my pistol, by a stroke of ingenuity which it gives me a grim
pleasure to recall; for no maternal or other female eyes would explore
the cavity of that dread implement in search of contraband commodities.

It was settled, then, that I should go to Phillips Academy, and
preparations were made that I might join the school at the beginning of
the autumn.

In due time I took my departure in the old carriage, a little modernized
from the pattern of my Lady Bountiful's, and we jogged soberly
along,--kind parents and slightly nostalgic boy,--towards the seat of
learning, some twenty miles away. Up the old West Cambridge road, now
North Avenue; past Davenport's tavern, with its sheltering tree and
swinging sign; past the old powder-house, looking like a colossal
conical ball set on end; past the old Tidd House, one of the finest
of the ante-Revolutionary mansions; past Miss Swan's great square
boarding-school, where the music of girlish laughter was ringing through
the windy corridors; so on to Stoneham, town of the bright lake, then
darkened with the recent memory of the barbarous murder done by its
lonely shore; through pleasant Reading, with its oddly named village
centres, "Trapelo," "Read'nwoodeend," as rustic speech had it, and the
rest; through Wilmington, then renowned for its hops; so at last into
the hallowed borders of the academic town.

It was a shallow, two-story white house before which we stopped, just
at the entrance of the central village, the residence of a very worthy
professor in the theological seminary,--learned, amiable, exemplary, but
thought by certain experts to be a little questionable in the matter of
homoousianism, or some such doctrine. There was a great rock that showed
its round back in the narrow front yard. It looked cold and hard; but
it hinted firmness and indifference to the sentiments fast struggling
to get uppermost in my youthful bosom; for I was not too old for
home-sickness,--who is: The carriage and my fond companions had to leave
me at last. I saw it go down the declivity that sloped southward, then
climb the next ascent, then sink gradually until the window in the back
of it disappeared like an eye that shuts, and leaves the world dark to
some widowed heart.

Sea-sickness and home-sickness are hard t