I looked eagerly at the long, low casements:  a faint glimmer was visible.  It proceeded only from the wan reflection of a sickly sunbeam behind me, struggling through the cleft of a dark hail-cloud.  It was the window where in my boyhood I had often peeped at the town-clock through my little telescope.  There was the nursery chamber, and no wonder that it was regarded with feelings of the deepest interest.  Here the first dawnings of reason broke in upon my soul; the first faint gleams of intelligence awakened me from a state of infantine unconsciousness.  It was here that I first drank eagerly of the fresh rills of knowledge; here my imagination, ardent and unrepressed, first plumed its wings for flight, and I stepped forth over its threshold into a world long since tried, and found as unsatisfying and unreal as the false glimmer that now mocked me from the hall of my fathers.

A truce to sentiment!—­I came hither, it may be, for a different purpose.  A temporary gush will occasionally spring up from the first well-head of our affections.  However homely and seemingly ill-adapted, in outward show and character, for giving birth to those feelings generally designated by the epithet romantic, the place where we first breathed, where our ideas were first moulded, formed and assimilated, as it were, to the condition of the surrounding atmosphere (their very shape and colour determined by the medium in which they first sprung) the casual recurrence of a scene like this,—­forming part and parcel of our very existence, and incorporated with the very fabric of our thoughts,—­must, in spite of all subsequent impressions, revive those feelings, however long they may have been dormant, with a force and vividness which the bare recollection can never excite.

The garden-gate stood open.  The initials of my name, still legible, appeared rudely carved on the posts—­a boyish propensity which most of us have indulged; and I well remember ministering to its gratification wherever I durst hazard the experiment, when first initiated into the mystery of hewing out these important letters with a rusty pen-knife.

Not a creature was stirring; and the nature of the present occupants, whether sylphs, gnomes, or genii, was a question not at all, as it yet appeared, in a train for solution.  The front door was closed; but, as I knew every turn and corner about the house, I made no doubt of soon finding out its inmates, if any of them were in the neighbourhood.  I worked my way through the garden, knee-deep and rank with weed, for the purpose of reconnoitring the back-offices.  I steered pretty cautiously past what memory, that great dealer in hyperbole, had hitherto generally contrived to picture as a huge lake—­now, to my astonishment, dwindled into a duck-pond—­but not without danger from its slippery margin.  It still reposed under the shadow of the old cherry-tree, once the harbinger of delight, as the returning season gave intimation of another bountiful supply of fruit.