unt twenty houses where I remember to have
lived? The Wandering Jew is a parable for a tenant housekeeper that
"moves" every spring; and I might be his son. Cursed be moving! What a
long list of houses! There is the A---- house, which I dimly recollect,
and where I think we had some beehives; the S---- house, where we
boarded, and I fell down and broke a bone; the L---- house, where also
we boarded, and there were many young girls. There I dreamed of an
angel,--a person about eight feet long, flying along past the
second-story side-windows, in the conventional horizontal attitude, so
suggestive of a "crick in the neck," with great, wide wings, tooting
through a trumpet as long as himself; and out of each temple, as I
distinctly remember, grew a thing like a knitting-needle, with a cherry
on the end. There was also the Cl---- house, where was a tree of
horrible, nauseating red plums; the W---- house, quaint and many-gabled;
the C---- house, where I had my last whipping. Ah, that whipping,--those
other whippings! How resolutely did they each make me vow that the next
ugly thing which I could safely do should surely be done! A whipping
inflicted upon a child old enough to remember it is almost certainly a
horrible mistake. No one knows how often it happens that a child's sense
of personal insult or degradation, though incapable of expression, is
every whit as quick and deep as a man's.

Other houses I remember,--in broad streets, narrow streets,--in
close-built blocks, in open outskirts,--even a mile or two away among
the green fields,--lived in, boarded in. I am cheated in heart by
injurious superfluity of houses. One home, remembered alone, would stand
embowered forever,--if not among ancestral trees and vines, then in
clustering memories far more lovely and more cherished. But what dignity
or beauty or quiet or distinctness can attach to the score of tenements
that scurry helter-skelter through my memory? It is little better than
the vision of the drunken men-at-arms in the castle of the parodist:--

"Then straight there did appear, to each gallant Gorbalier,
_Forty_ castles dancing near, all around!"

An unblest memory!

I believe I once stole a quantity of rather moist brown sugar, and hid
it, a clumsy, sticky, brown-paper parcel, between my bed and the
sacking. A chambermaid discovered the _corpus delicti_, and something
was done,--I forget what. But I wish I had never done anything worse!

O dear! I use