nscathed by the strife of years--and herein was a difference. Some of
the very bushes I recognized as our old lurking-places at "hunt the
hare"; and, on the old fantastic beech-tree, I discovered the very bough
from which we were accustomed to suspend our swings. What
alterations--what sad havoc had time, circumstances, the hand of fortune,
and the stroke of death, made among us since then! How were the thoughts
of the heart, the hopes, the pursuits, the feelings changed; and, in
almost every instance, it is to be feared, for the worse! As I gazed
around me, and paused, I could not help reciting aloud to myself the
lines of Charles Lamb, so touching in their simple beauty.

"I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
Some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me, all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces."

The fresh green plat, by the brink of the stream, lay before me. It was
there that we played at leap-frog, or gathered dandelions for our tame
rabbits; and, at its western extremity, were still extant the reliques of
the deal-seat, at which we used to assemble on autumn evenings to have
our round of stories. Many a witching tale and wondrous tradition hath
there been told; many a marvel of "figures that visited the glimpses of
the moon"; many a recital of heroic and chivalrous enterprise,
accomplished ere warriors dwindled away to the mere puny strength of
mortals. Sapped by the wind and rain, the planks lay in a sorely decayed
and rotten state, looking in their mossiness like a sign-post of
desolation, a memento of terrestrial instability. Traces of the knife
were still here and there visible upon the trunks of the supporting
trees; and with little difficulty I could decipher some well-remembered
initials.

"Cold were the hands that carved them there."

It is, no doubt, wonderful that the human mind can retain such a mass of
recollections; yet we seem to be, in general, little aware that for one
solitary incident in our lives, preserved by memory, hundreds have been
buried in the silent charnel-house of oblivion. We peruse the past, like
a map of pleasing or melancholy recollections, and observe lines crossing
and re-crossing each other in a thousand directions; some spots are
almost blank; others faintly traced; and the rest a confused a