The natural death of a house is very much like that of one of its human tenants.  The roof is the first part to show the distinct signs of age.  Slates and tiles loosen and at last slide off, and leave bald the boards that supported them; shingles darken and decay, and soon the garret or the attic lets in the rain and the snow; by and by the beams sag, the floors warp, the walls crack, the paper peels away, the ceilings scale off and fall, the windows are crusted with clinging dust, the doors drop from their rusted hinges, the winds come in without knocking and howl their cruel death-songs through the empty rooms and passages, and at last there comes a crash, a great cloud of dust rises, and the home that had been the shelter of generation after generation finds its grave in its own cellar.  Only the chimney remains as its monument.  Slowly, little by little, the patient solvents that find nothing too hard for their chemistry pick out the mortar from between the bricks; at last a mighty wind roars around it and rushes against it, and the monumental relic crashes down among the wrecks it has long survived.  So dies a human habitation left to natural decay, all that was seen above the surface of the soil sinking gradually below it,

   Till naught remains the saddening tale to tell
   Save home’s last wrecks, the cellar and the well.

But if this sight is saddening, what is it to see a human dwelling fall by the hand of violence!  The ripping off of the shelter that has kept out a thousand storms, the tearing off of the once ornamental woodwork, the wrench of the inexorable crowbar, the murderous blows of the axe, the progressive ruin, which ends by rending all the joints asunder and flinging the tenoned and mortised timbers into heaps that will be sawed and split to warm some new habitation as firewood,—­what a brutal act of destruction it seems!

Why should I go over the old house again, having already described it more than ten years ago?  Alas! how many remember anything they read but once, and so long ago as that?  How many would find it out if one should say over in the same words that which he said in the last decade?  But there is really no need of telling the story a second time, for it can be found by those who are curious enough to look it up in a volume of which it occupies the opening chapter.

In order, however, to save any inquisitive reader that trouble, let me remind him that the old house was General Ward’s headquarters at the breaking out of the Revolution; that the plan for fortifying Bunker’s Hill was laid, as commonly believed, in the southeast lower room, the floor of which was covered with dents, made, it was alleged, by the butts of the soldiers’ muskets.  In that house, too, General Warren probably passed the night before the Bunker Hill battle, and over its threshold must the stately figure of Washington have often cast its shadow.

But the house in which one drew his first breath, and where he one day came into the consciousness that he was a personality, an ego, a little universe with a sky over him all his own, with a persistent identity, with the terrible responsibility of a separate, independent, inalienable existence,—­that house does not ask for any historical associations to make it the centre of the earth for him.