How we have parted, and wandered, and married, and died!  I wonder what has become of all the boys who went to the Temple Grammar School at Rivermouth when I was a youngster?  “All, all are gone, the old familiar faces!”

It is with no ungentle hand I summon them back, for a moment, from that Past which has closed upon them and upon me.  How pleasantly they live again in my memory!  Happy, magical Past, in whose fairy atmosphere even Conway, mine ancient foe, stands forth transfigured, with a sort of dreamy glory encircling his bright red hair!

With the old school formula I commence these sketches of my boyhood.  My name is Tom Bailey; what is yours, gentle reader?  I take for granted it is neither Wiggins nor Spriggins, and that we shall get on famously together, and be capital friends forever.

Chapter Two—­In Which I Entertain Peculiar Views

I was born at Rivermouth, but, before I had a chance to become very well acquainted with that pretty New England town, my parents removed to New Orleans, where my father invested his money so securely in the banking business that he was never able to get any of it out again.  But of this hereafter.

I was only eighteen months old at the time of the removal, and it didn’t make much difference to me where I was, because I was so small; but several years later, when my father proposed to take me North to be educated, I had my own peculiar views on the subject.  I instantly kicked over the little Negro boy who happened to be standing by me at the moment, and, stamping my foot violently on the floor of the piazza, declared that I would not be taken away to live among a lot of Yankees!

You see I was what is called “a Northern man with Southern principles.”  I had no recollection of New England:  my earliest memories were connected with the South, with Aunt Chloe, my old Negro nurse, and with the great ill-kept garden in the centre of which stood our house—­a whitewashed stone house it was, with wide verandas—­shut out from the street by lines of orange, fig, and magnolia trees.  I knew I was born at the North, but hoped nobody would find it out.  I looked upon the misfortune as something so shrouded by time and distance that maybe nobody remembered it.  I never told my schoolmates I was a Yankee, because they talked about the Yankees in such a scornful way it made me feel that it was quite a disgrace not to be born in Louisiana, or at least in one of the Border States.  And this impression was strengthened by Aunt Chloe, who said, “dar wasn’t no gentl’men in the Norf no way,” and on one occasion terrified me beyond measure by declaring that, “if any of dem mean whites tried to git her away from marster, she was jes’gwine to knock ’em on de head wid a gourd!”

The way this poor creature’s eyes flashed, and the tragic air with which she struck at an imaginary “mean white,” are among the most vivid things in my memory of those days.