For two years I have had a most faithful, intimate, and useful friend, whom I have constantly worn next my heart.  I do not know him for a Spiritualist, but by some mysterious sympathy he hears the incessant, ghostly foot-falls of Time, and repeats them accurately to my ear.  While I wake he tells me how Time is passing.  While I sleep he is still marking his steps, so that sometimes I have a feeling of awe, as if my mysterious friend were counting my own life away.  Then again I am sure that in the faint, persistent monotone of his voice I hear the singing of the old mower’s inevitable scythe.  The Imagination contemplates this friend of mine with wonder.  But Science sees him holding the hand of a captain in his ship at sea, or of a conductor in a train on shore, and honors in him the friend of civilization.

His native place is Waltham, in Massachusetts, and he invited me but a few days since to accompany him in a little visit thither.  I cheerfully assented, and we took the cars in Boston, at the Worcester Depot, and after passing a range of unsavory back-yards and ill-favored houses, and winding beneath streets and by the side of kennels, we emerged upon the broad meadows and marshes from which rise in the distance the Roxbury and Brookline hills.  The whole region is covered with bright, wooden houses.  The villages have a pert, thrifty, contented air, which no suburbs in the world surpass.  If the houses are very white and a village looks like a camp, it is because the instinct of the inhabitants assures them that they may strike their tents to-morrow and move Westward or elsewhere to a greater prosperity.  In older countries the stained and ancient stone houses are symbols of the inflexible state of society to which they belong.  The dwellers are anchored to that condition.  There is no “Westward ho” for them.  Like father, like son.  The hod-carrier’s son carries hods.  Even the headsman’s office is hereditary.

“Yes, yes,” hummed my friend, in his patient, persistent monotone, “the American citizen is an aerial plant.  He has no roots.  There is no wrenching, when he changes place.  If there were, how could he overrun the continent in time?  He must carry lighter weight than Caesar’s soldiers.  What has he to do with old houses?  His very inventions would make his house intolerable to him in twenty or thirty years.”

“But we are going at this very moment to see your ancestral halls, are we not?” I modestly inquired.

“Yes,” he replied; “but they are not ten years old, and every year changes them.”

By this time we were gliding through the gardens of Brookline and Brighton, which have been afflicted of late years with the Mansard epidemic.  It has swept the whole region.  Scarcely a house has escaped.  Even the newest are touched,—­sometimes only upon the extremities or outbuildings, but more frequently they are covered all over with the Mansard.

“That affection of the house-top,” whispered I to my friend, “was originally derived from the dome of the Invalides, and has raged now for a century and a half.”