“The morning after our arrival in Litchfield we sallied forth alone. The day was high and wide, full of stillness, and serenely radiant. As we carried our present life up the North Street we met at every step our boyhood life coming down. There were the old trees, but looking not so large as to our young eyes. The stately road had, however, been bereaved of the buttonball trees, which had been crippled by disease. But the old elms retained a habit peculiar to Litchfield. There seemed to be a current of wind which at times passes high up in the air over the town, and which moves the tops of the trees, while on the ground there is no movement of wind. How vividly did that sound from above bring back early days, when for hours we lay upon the windless grass and watched the top leaves flutter, and marked how still were the under leaves of the same tree! “One by one came the old houses. On the corner stood and stands the jail—awful building to young sinners! We never passed its grated windows without a salutary chill. The old store, and same old name, Buell, on it; the bank, and its long, lean legs spindling up to hold the shelf up under the roof! The Colonel Tallmadge house, that used to seem so grand that it was cold, but whose cherry-trees in the front yard seemed warm enough and attractive to our longing lips and watery mouths. How well do we remember the stately gait of the venerable colonel of Revolutionary memory! We don’t recollect that he ever spoke to us or greeted us; not because he was austere or unkind, but from a kind of military reserve. We thought him good and polite, but should as soon have thought of climbing the church-steeple as of speaking to one living so high and venerable above all boys! “Then came Judge Gould’s! Did we not remember that and the faces that used to illuminate it? The polished and polite judge, the sons and daughters, the little office in the yard, the successive classes of law students that received that teaching which has since so often honored both bar and bench. Here, too, we stopped to retrace the very place where, being set on by a fiery young Southern blood, without any cause that we knew of then or can remember now, we undertook to whip one of Judge Gould’s sons, and did not do it. We were never satisfied with the result, and think if the thing could be reviewed now it might turn out differently. “There, too, stood Dr. Catlin’s house, looking as if the rubs of time had polished it instead of injuring. Next there seemed to our puzzled memory a vacancy. Ought there not to be about there a Holmes house, to which we used to go and get baskets of Virgaloo pears, and were inwardly filled, as a satisfying method of keeping us honest toward the pears in the basket?