cluster the homes of so many of her bravest and hardiest children,—­I can never look at them without feeling that, vast and remote and awful as they are, there is a kind of inward heat and muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings them into a vague sort of sympathy with human hearts.  It is more than a year since I have looked on those blue mountains, and they “are to me as a feeling” now, and have been ever since.

I had only to pass a wall and I was in the burial-ground.  It was thinly tenanted as I remember it, but now populous with the silent immigrants of more than a whole generation.  There lay the dead I had left, the two or three students of the Seminary; the son of the worthy pair in whose house I lived, for whom in those days hearts were still aching, and by whose memory the house still seemed haunted.  A few upright stones were all that I recollect.  But now, around them were the monuments of many of the dead whom I remembered as living.  I doubt if there has been a more faithful reader of these graven stones than myself for many a long day.  I listened to more than one brief sermon from preachers whom I had often heard as they thundered their doctrines down upon me from the throne-like desk.  Now they spoke humbly out of the dust, from a narrower pulpit, from an older text than any they ever found in Cruden’s Concordance, but there was an eloquence in their voices the listening chapel had never known.  There were stately monuments and studied inscriptions, but none so beautiful, none so touching, as that which hallows the resting-place of one of the children of the very learned Professor Robinson:  “Is it well with the child?  And she answered, It is well.”

While I was musing amidst these scenes in the mood of Hamlet, two old men, as my little ghost called them, appeared on the scene to answer to the gravedigger and his companion.  They christened a mountain or two for me, “Kearnsarge” among the rest, and revived some old recollections, of which the most curious was “Basil’s Cave.”  The story was recent, when I was there, of one Basil, or Bezill, or Buzzell, or whatever his name might have been, a member of the Academy, fabulously rich, Orientally extravagant, and of more or less lawless habits.  He had commanded a cave to be secretly dug, and furnished it sumptuously, and there with his companions indulged in revelries such as the daylight of that consecrated locality had never looked upon.  How much truth there was in it all I will not pretend to say, but I seem to remember stamping over every rock that sounded hollow, to question if it were not the roof of what was once Basil’s Cave.

The sun was getting far past the meridian, and I sought a shelter under which to partake of the hermit fare I had brought with me.  Following the slope of the hill northward behind the cemetery, I found a pleasant clump of trees grouped about some rocks, disposed so as to give a seat, a table, and a shade.  I left my benediction on this pretty little natural caravansera, and a brief record on one of its white birches, hoping to visit it again on some sweet summer or autumn day.