For I must be permitted to remind you that I have not yet opened it.  I have told you that I have just finished a long memoir, and that it has cost me no little labor to overcome some of its difficulties,—­if I have overcome them, which others must decide.  And I feel exactly as honest Dobbin feels when his harness is slipped off after a long journey with a good deal of up-hill work.  He wants to rest a little, then to feed a little; then, if you will turn him loose in the pasture, he wants to roll.  I have left my starry and ethereal companionship,—­not for a long time, I hope, for it has lifted me above my common self, but for a while.  And now I want, so to speak, to roll in the grass and among the dandelions with the other pachyderms.  So I have kept to the outside of the portfolio as yet, and am disporting myself in reminiscences, and fancies, and vagaries, and parentheses.

How well I understand the feeling which led the Pisans to load their vessels with earth from the Holy Land, and fill the area of the Campo Santo with that sacred soil!  The old house stood upon about as perverse a little patch of the planet as ever harbored a half-starved earth-worm.  It was as sandy as Sahara and as thirsty as Tantalus.  The rustic aid-de-camps of the household used to aver that all fertilizing matters “leached” through it.  I tried to disprove their assertion by gorging it with the best of terrestrial nourishment, until I became convinced that I was feeding the tea-plants of China, and then I gave over the attempt.  And yet I did love, and do love, that arid patch of ground.  I wonder if a single flower could not be made to grow in a pot of earth from that Campo Santo of my childhood!  One noble product of nature did not refuse to flourish there,—­the tall, stately, beautiful, soft-haired, many-jointed, generous maize or Indian corn, which thrives on sand and defies the blaze of our shrivelling summer.  What child but loves to wander in its forest-like depths, amidst the rustling leaves and with the lofty tassels tossing their heads high above him!  There are two aspects of the cornfield which always impress my imagination:  the first when it has reached its full growth, and its ordered ranks look like an army on the march with its plumed and bannered battalions; the second when, after the battle of the harvest, the girdled stacks stand on the field of slaughter like so many ragged Niobes,—­say rather like the crazy widows and daughters of the dead soldiery.

Once more let us come back to the old house.  It was far along in its second century when the edict went forth that it must stand no longer.