Sea-sickness and home-sickness are hard to deal with by any remedy but time.  Mine was not a bad case, but it excited sympathy.  There was an ancient, faded old lady in the house, very kindly, but very deaf, rustling about in dark autumnal foliage of silk or other murmurous fabric, somewhat given to snuff, but a very worthy gentlewoman of the poor-relation variety.  She comforted me, I well remember, but not with apples, and stayed me, but not with flagons.  She went in her benevolence, and, taking a blue and white soda-powder, mingled the same in water, and encouraged me to drink the result.  It might be a specific for seasickness, but it was not for home-sickness.  The fiz was a mockery, and the saline refrigerant struck a colder chill to my despondent heart.  I did not disgrace myself, however, and a few days cured me, as a week on the water often cures seasickness.

There was a sober-faced boy of minute dimensions in the house, who began to make some advances to me, and who, in spite of all the conditions surrounding him, turned out, on better acquaintance, to be one of the most amusing, free-spoken, mocking little imps I ever met in my life.  My room-mate came later.  He was the son of a clergyman in a neighboring town,—­in fact I may remark that I knew a good many clergymen’s sons at Andover.  He and I went in harness together as well as most boys do, I suspect; and I have no grudge against him, except that once, when I was slightly indisposed, he administered to me,—­with the best intentions, no doubt,—­a dose of Indian pills, which effectually knocked me out of time, as Mr. Morrissey would say,—­not quite into eternity, but so near it that I perfectly remember one of the good ladies told me (after I had come to my senses a little, and was just ready for a sip of cordial and a word of encouragement), with that delightful plainness of speech which so brings realities home to the imagination, that “I never should look any whiter when I was laid out as a corpse.”  After my room-mate and I had been separated twenty-five years, fate made us fellow-townsmen and acquaintances once more in Berkshire, and now again we are close literary neighbors; for I have just read a very pleasant article, signed by him, in the last number of the “Galaxy.”  Does it not sometimes seem as if we were all marching round and round in a circle, like the supernumeraries who constitute the “army” of a theatre, and that each of us meets and is met by the same and only the same people, or their doubles, twice, thrice, or a little oftener, before the curtain drops and the “army” puts off its borrowed clothes?

The old Academy building had a dreary look, with its flat face, bare and uninteresting as our own “University Building” at Cambridge, since the piazza which relieved its monotony was taken away, and, to balance the ugliness thus produced, the hideous projection was added to “Harvard Hall.”  Two masters sat at the end of the great room,—­the principal and his assistant.  Two others presided in separate rooms, one of them the late Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, an excellent and lovable man, who looked kindly on me, and for whom I always cherished a sincere regard, a clergyman’s son, too, which privilege I did not always find the warrant of signal virtues; but no matter about that here, and I have promised myself to be amiable.