nd, hastily
dressing, opened the door of my room and went down-stairs. The hour
was very early, it being not yet fairly light, and I found no one in
the lower part of the house. There was a hat in the hall, and, opening
the front door, which was fastened with a slightness indicating that
burglary was not among the perils of the modern Boston, I found myself
on the street. For two hours I walked or ran through the streets of
the city, visiting most quarters of the peninsular part of the town.
None but an antiquarian who knows something of the contrast which the
Boston of to-day offers to the Boston of the nineteenth century can
begin to appreciate what a series of bewildering surprises I underwent
during that time. Viewed from the house-top the day before, the city
had indeed appeared strange to me, but that was only in its general
aspect. How complete the change had been I first realized now that I
walked the streets. The few old landmarks which still remained only
intensified this effect, for without them I might have imagined myself
in a foreign town. A man may leave his native city in childhood, and
return fifty years later, perhaps, to find it transformed in many
features. He is astonished, but he is not bewildered. He is aware of a
great lapse of time, and of changes likewise occurring in himself
meanwhile. He but dimly recalls the city as he knew it when a child.
But remember that there was no sense of any lapse of time with me. So
far as my consciousness was concerned, it was but yesterday, but a few
hours, since I had walked these streets in which scarcely a feature
had escaped a complete metamorphosis. The mental image of the old city
was so fresh and strong that it did not yield to the impression of the
actual city, but contended with it, so that it was first one and then
the other which seemed the more unreal. There was nothing I saw which
was not blurred in this way, like the faces of a composite photograph.

Finally, I stood again at the door of the house from which I had come
out. My feet must have instinctively brought me back to the site of my
old home, for I had no clear idea of returning thither. It was no more
homelike to me than any other spot in this city of a strange
generation, nor were its inmates less utterly and necessarily
strangers than all the other men and women now on the earth. Had the
door of the house been locked, I should have been reminded by its
resistance that I had no object in ent