do with my purpose.

Enough to say that at last I discovered Fuller Place,--a mean, little
right-angled street that led nowhere; but from one end to the other I
could not find my old home. Its site must now be occupied by one of
those ugly five-story apartment boxes that spring like weeds in old
towns and cities. As I lingered in front of the brick wall that I judged
must very nearly cover the site of my birthplace, I tried to understand
the sensation of utter unfamiliarity with which the whole place filled
me. The answer came to me in a flash as I turned away from Fuller
Place,--Clark's Field no longer existed! Its place was completely filled
by the maze of brick and mortar in which for the better part of an hour
I had lost myself. There was nothing surprising that after a third of a
century a large, vacant field should have been carved up into streets,
alleys, and lots, and be covered with buildings to house the growing
population of a city. It is one of the usual commonplaces in our
American cities and towns. But to me the total disappearance of Clark's
Field seemed momentous. That large, open tract near my old home had more
significance, at least in memory, than the home itself. It was
intricately interwoven with all the imaginative and more personal life
that I had known as a boy. One corner of the irregular open land known
as Clark's Field had abutted my father's small property in Fuller Place,
and I and my older brothers and our friends had taken advantage of this
fact to open an unauthorized entrance into the Field through the board
fence in the rear yard. Over that fence lay freedom from parental
control and family tasks, and there was also, it happened, a certain bed
of luscious strawberries which we regularly looted until the market
gardener, who at the time leased this corner of Clark's Field, resigned
himself to the inevitable and substituted winter cabbages for the
strawberries,--a crop he had never been able to get to market.

From the gardener's beds and small forcing-houses the land stretched
away unbroken by cultivation or building to that Swan's Hill where we
coasted and farther to the suburban estates of several affluent
citizens,--I presume the homes of Stearns and Frost of stove fame and
others no longer remembered. These places, with their stately trees and
greenhouses and careful lawns, have also been merged into the domain of
brick and mortar and concrete. To the right of the market garden,
bet