The Professor lived in that house a long time,—­not twenty years, but pretty near it.  When he entered that door, two shadows glided over the threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for the last time,—­and one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be longer than his own.  What changes he saw in that quiet place!  Death rained through every roof but his; children came into life, grew to maturity, wedded, faded away, threw themselves away; the whole drama of life was played in that stock-company’s theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling.  Peace be to those walls, forever,—­the Professor said,—­for the many pleasant years he has passed within them!

The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been with him in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in imagination with tender interest wherever he goes.—­In that little court, where he lived in gay loneliness so long,—­

—­in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes loitering down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord, swallowing up the small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it goes, until it gets proud and swollen and wantons in huge luxurious oxbows about the fair Northampton meadows, and at last overflows the oldest inhabitant’s memory in profligate freshets at Hartford and all along its lower shores,—­up in that caravansary on the banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement processions,—­where blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance, and the hills of Beulah, as the Professor always called them, rolled up the opposite horizon in soft climbing masses, so suggestive of the Pilgrim’s Heavenward Path that he used to look through his old “Dollond” to see if the Shining Ones were not within range of sight,—­sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks that carried them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to the terminus of their harmless stroll,—­the patulous fage, in the Professor’s classic dialect,—­the spreading beech, in more familiar phrase,—­[stop and breathe here a moment, for the sentence is not done yet, and we have another long journey before us,]—­

—­and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the amber-flowing Housatonic,—­dark stream, but clear, like the lucid orbs that shine beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed demi-blondes,—­in the home overlooking the winding stream and the smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the tracks of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the winter snow; facing the twin summits which rise in the far North, the highest waves of the great land-storm in all this billowy region,—­suggestive to mad fancies of the breasts of a half-buried Titaness, stretched out by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden away beneath the leaves of the forest,—­in that home where seven blessed summers were passed, which stand in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer,—­