—­I wonder if anything like this ever happened.  Author writing, jacks?”

    “To be, or not to be:  that is the question
     Whether ’t is nobl—­”

—­“William, shall we have pudding to-day, or flapjacks?”

—­“Flapjacks, an’ it please thee, Anne, or a pudding, for that matter; or what thou wilt, good woman, so thou come not betwixt me and my thought.”

—­Exit Mistress Anne, with strongly accented closing of the door and murmurs to the effect:  “Ay, marry, ’t is well for thee to talk as if thou hadst no stomach to fill.  We poor wives must swink for our masters, while they sit in their arm-chairs growing as great in the girth through laziness as that ill-mannered fat man William hath writ of in his books of players’ stuff.  One had as well meddle with a porkpen, which hath thorns all over him, as try to deal with William when his eyes be rolling in that mad way.”

William—­writing once more—­after an exclamation in strong English of the older pattern,—­

     “Whether ’t is nobler—­nobler—­nobler—­”

To do what?  O these women! these women! to have puddings or flapjacks!  Oh!—­

    “Whether ’t is nobler—­in the mind—­to suffer
     The slings—­and arrows—­of—­”

Oh!  Oh! these women!  I will e’en step over to the parson’s and have a cup of sack with His Reverence for methinks Master Hamlet hath forgot that which was just now on his lips to speak.

So I shall have to put off making my friends acquainted with the other boarders, some of whom seem to me worth studying and describing.  I have something else of a graver character for my readers.  I am talking, you know, as a poet; I do not say I deserve the name, but I have taken it, and if you consider me at all it must be in that aspect.  You will, therefore, be willing to run your eyes over a few pages read, of course by request, to a select party of the boarders.

          Thegambrel-roofed house and its outlook.

A panorama, with side-shows.

My birthplace, the home of my childhood and earlier and later boyhood, has within a few months passed out of the ownership of my family into the hands of that venerable Alma Mater who seems to have renewed her youth, and has certainly repainted her dormitories.  In truth, when I last revisited that familiar scene and looked upon the flammantia mania of the old halls, “Massachusetts” with the dummy clock-dial, “Harvard” with the garrulous belfry, little “Holden” with the sculptured unpunishable cherub over its portal, and the rest of my early brick-and-mortar acquaintances, I could not help saying to myself that I had lived to see the peaceable establishment of the Red Republic of Letters.

Many of the things I shall put down I have no doubt told before in a fragmentary way, how many I cannot be quite sure, as I do not very often read my own prose works.  But when a man dies a great deal is said of him which has often been said in other forms, and now this dear old house is dead to me in one sense, and I want to gather up my recollections and wind a string of narrative round them, tying them up like a nosegay for the last tribute:  the same blossoms in it I have often laid on its threshold while it was still living for me.