will be three centuries old, and it had already seen nine generations of men when I caught its eye (Alchemiae Doctrina) and recognized it at pistol-shot distance as a prize, among the breviaries and Heures and trumpery volumes of the old open-air dealer who exposed his treasures under the shadow of St. Sulpice.  I have never lost my taste for alchemy since I first got hold of the Palladium Spagyricum of Peter John Faber, and sought—­in vain, it is true—­through its pages for a clear, intelligible, and practical statement of how I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights of tall kitchen clock into good yellow gold, specific gravity 19.2, and exchangeable for whatever I then wanted, and for many more things than I was then aware of.  One of the greatest pleasures of childhood found in the mysteries which it hides from the skepticism of the elders, and works up into small mythologies of its own.  I have seen all this played over again in adult life,—­the same delightful bewilderment semi-emotional belief in listening to the gaseous praises of this or that fantastic system, that I found in the pleasing mirages conjured up for me by the ragged old volume I used to pore over in the southeast attic-chamber.

The rooms of the second story, the chambers of birth and death, are sacred to silent memories.

Let us go down to the ground-floor.  I should have begun with this, but that the historical reminiscences of the old house have been recently told in a most interesting memoir by a distinguished student of our local history.  I retain my doubts about those “dents” on the floor of the right-hand room, “the study” of successive occupants, said to have been made by the butts of the Continental militia’s firelocks, but this was the cause to which the story told me in childhood laid them.  That military consultations were held in that room when the house was General Ward’s headquarters, that the Provincial generals and colonels and other men of war there planned the movement which ended in the fortifying of Bunker’s Hill, that Warren slept in the house the night before the battle, that President Langdon went forth from the western door and prayed for God’s blessing on the men just setting forth on their bloody expedition,—­all these things have been told, and perhaps none of them need be doubted.

But now for fifty years and more that room has been a meeting-ground for the platoons and companies which range themselves at the scholar’s word of command.  Pleasant it is to think that the retreating host of books is to give place to a still larger army of volumes, which have seen service under the eye of a great commander.  For here the noble collection of him so freshly remembered as our silver-tongued orator, our erudite scholar, our honored College President, our accomplished statesman, our courtly ambassador, are to be reverently gathered by the heir of his name, himself not unworthy to be surrounded by that august assembly of the wise of all ages and of various lands and languages.