MY 80YH00&8 HOME. 471
twenty-nine years ago, That picture of it was stall as dear and vvrid
to me as a photograph. I stepped ashore with the feeling of one
who returns out of a dead-and-gone generation* I had a sort of
realising sense of what the Bastille prisoners must have felt when they
used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity, and
note how curiously the familiar and the strange were mixed together
before them. I saw the new houses—saw them plainly enough—
but they did not affect the older picture in my mind, for through
their solid bricks and mortar I saw the vanished houses, which had
formerly stood there, with perfect distinctness.
It was Sunday morning, and everybody was abed yet. So I
passed through the vacant streets, still seeing the town as it was, and
not as it is, and recognising and metaphorically shaking hands with
a hundred familiar objects which no longer exist; and finally climbed
Holiday's Hill to get a comprehensive view. The whole town lay
spread out below me then, and I could mark and fix every locality,
every detail. Naturally, I was a good deal moved. 1 said, * Many
of the people I once knew in this tranquil refuge of my childhood are.
now in heaven; some, I trust, are in the other place.'
The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again
—-convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply been
dreaming an unusually long dream; but my reflections spoiled all
that; for they forced me to say, * I see fifty old houses down yonder,
into each of which I could enter and find either a man or a woman
who was a baby or unborn when I noticed those houses last, or a
grandmother who was a plump young bride at that time.*
From *foJR vantage ground the extensive view up sad down the
river, and wide over the wooded expanses of Illinois, is very beautiful
—one of the most beautiful ott the Mississippi, I thick; which is a
hazardous remark to make, for the eight hundred miles of river
between St. Ix>uis and St. Paul afford an unbroken succession of
lovely pictures. It may be that my affection for the one in question
biases my judgment in its favour j I cannot say as to that. No
matter, it was satisfyingly beautiful to me, and it had this advantage
over all the other friends whom I was about to greet again : It had
suffered no change; it was as young and fresh and comely and graekras
as ever it had been - whereas, the feeea of the others wtmld be old,