Now the old house had wainscots, behind which the mice were always scampering and squeaking and rattling down the plaster, and enacting family scenes and parlor theatricals.It had a cellar where the cold slug clung to the walls, and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long white potato-shoots went feeling along the floor, if haply they might find the daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat with holding up the burden they had been aching under day and night far a century and more; it had sepulchral arches closed by rough doors that hung on hinges rotten with rust, behind which doors, if there was not a heap of bones connected with a mysterious disappearance of long ago, there well might have been, for it was just the place to look for them.It had a garret; very nearly such a one as it seems to me one of us has described in one of his books;but let us look at this one as I can reproduce it from memory.It has a flooring of laths with ridges of mortar squeezed up between them, which if you tread on you will go to--the Lord have mercy on you! where will you go to?--the same being crossed by narrow bridges of boards, on which you may put your feet, but with fear and trembling.Above you and around you are beams and joists, on some of which you may see, when the light is let in, the marks of the conchoidal clippings of the broadaxe, showing the rude way in which the timber was shaped as it came, full of sap, from the neighboring forest.It is a realm of darkness and thick dust, and shroud-like cobwebs and dead things they wrap in their gray folds.For a garret is like a seashore, where wrecks are thrown up and slowly go to pieces.There is the cradle which the old man you just remember was rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead he died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences.And there are old leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and old brass andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them on their paltry substitutes, and they shall have their own again, and bring with them the fore-stick and the back-log of ancient days; and the empty churn, with its idle dasher, which the Nancys and Phoebes, who have left their comfortable places to the Bridgets and Norahs, used to handle to good purpose; and the brown, shaky old spinning-wheel, which was running, it may be, in the days when they were hinging the Salem witches.
Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which themselves had histories.On a pane in the northeastern chamber may be read these names:
"John Tracy," "Robert Roberts," "Thomas Prince "; "Stultus" another hand had added.When I found these names a few years ago (wrong side up, for the window had been reversed), I looked at once in the Triennial to find them, for the epithet showed that they were probably students.I found them all under the years 1771 and 1773.
Does it please their thin ghosts thus to be dragged to the light of day? Has "Stultus " forgiven the indignity of being thus characterized?
The southeast chamber was the Library Hospital.Every scholar should have a book infirmary attached his library.There should find a peaceable refuge the many books, invalids from their birth, which are sent "with the best regards of the Author"; the respected, but unpresentable cripples which have lost cover; the odd volumes of honored sets which go mourning all their days for their lost brother;the school-books which have been so often the subjects of assault and battery, that they look as if the police must know them by heart;these and still more the pictured story-books, beginning with Mother Goose (which a dear old friend of mine has just been amusing his philosophic leisure with turning most ingeniously and happily into the tongues of Virgil and Homer), will be precious mementos by and by, when children and grandchildren come along.What would I not give for that dear little paper-bound quarto, in large and most legible type, on certain pages of which the tender hand that was the shield of my infancy had crossed out with deep black marks something awful, probably about BEARS, such as once tare two-and-forty of us little folks for making faces, and the very name of which made us hide our heads under the bedclothes.
