remembered period of existence before we have learned the hard limitations of real life.  Those earliest months in which we lived in sensations without words, and ideas not fettered in sentences, have all the freshness of proofs of an engraving “before the letter.”  I am very thankful that the first part of my life was not passed shut in between high walls and treading the unimpressible and unsympathetic pavement.

Our university town was very much like the real country, in those days of which I am thinking.  There were plenty of huckleberries and blueberries within half a mile of the house.  Blackberries ripened in the fields, acorns and shagbarks dropped from the trees, squirrels ran among the branches, and not rarely the hen-hawk might be seen circling over the barnyard.  Still another rural element was not wanting, in the form of that far-diffused, infragrant effluvium, which, diluted by a good half mile of pure atmosphere, is no longer odious, nay is positively agreeable, to many who have long known it, though its source and centre has an unenviable reputation.  I need not name the animal whose Parthian warfare terrifies and puts to flight the mightiest hunter that ever roused the tiger from his jungle or faced the lion of the desert.  Strange as it may seem, an aerial hint of his personality in the far distance always awakens in my mind pleasant remembrances and tender reflections.  A whole neighborhood rises up before me:  the barn, with its haymow, where the hens laid their eggs to hatch, and we boys hid our apples to ripen, both occasionally illustrating the sic vos non vobis; the shed, where the annual Tragedy of the Pig was acted with a realism that made Salvini’s Othello seem but a pale counterfeit; the rickety old outhouse, with the “corn-chamber” which the mice knew so well; the paved yard, with its open gutter,—­these and how much else come up at the hint of my far-off friend, who is my very near enemy.  Nothing is more familiar than the power of smell in reviving old memories.  There was that quite different fragrance of the wood-house, the smell of fresh sawdust.  It comes back to me now, and with it the hiss of the saw; the tumble of the divorced logs which God put together and man has just put asunder; the coming down of the axe and the hah! that helped it,—­the straight-grained stick opening at the first appeal of the implement as if it were a pleasure, and the stick with a knot in the middle of it that mocked the blows and the hahs! until the beetle and wedge made it listen to reason,—­there are just such straight-grained and just such knotty men and women.  All this passes through my mind while Biddy, whose parlor-name is Angela, contents herself with exclaiming “egh!*******!”