“After emerging from this old town (Hadley) the colleges shone out from afar; then Mount Pleasant gradually, and one by one the various prominent dwellings in the village. I put up at the Baltwoods’ old tavern.... I first went to the college; walked up and down and around in the various entries, in the grove, by the well, in the chapel, in each recitation-room. Then I went to each of the rooms which I occupied in college. I sought out the spots which had a very melancholy interest from events in my morbid religious history. I then turned my steps to Mount Pleasant. I cannot tell the emotions that I had when I once more trod the grassy ascent where my opening manhood first fairly dawned. As I walked up the long slope I almost thought that I should see the crowd of boys break forth from some door. I stopped on the terrace where for three years I mustered with more than a hundred boys, and whence we marched to chapel, to meals, to church, etc. As I stood there Constantine seemed to rise up to greet me, as he never will greet me; Hunt, Pomeroy, French, Burt, Thayer, Tilghman, Dwight, Van Lennep, Fitzgerald, and scores of others. The wings of the building, the chapel, the kitchen, etc., were all taken away, so that the places where most I roomed, and the veranda in which I used to sit and muse and feel the rise and swell of yearnings the meaning of which I did not know, are all swept away. Here I spent the half-ideal and half-emotive, dreamy hours in which I used to look across the beautiful Connecticut River valley, and at the blue mountains that hedged it in, until my heart swelled and my eyes filled with tears; why, I could not tell. Then I would push out into the woods and romp with the wildest of them. I visited the grove, once beautiful, now meagre and forlorn. I went into the rear building; each room brought up some forgotten scene, some face remembered for good or ill. I went to the room where I roomed early in my course. The boys were at supper, and so I sat down and meditated awhile. The room in which I lived with Fitzgerald was not to be found, some changes in the interior of the house having shut it out from the entry where I formerly found it. It was a strange mixture of old things found again and old things not to be found—of surprise and disappointment, of things painful and of things joyful. All my favorites, the little fellows that I used to love and cherish, their faces looked out at me at every turn. I tried to find the trees, growing three from a root, on which I made steps and built a slat house up among the branches; where I used to sit wind-rocked and read or muse, cry and laugh, just as the fancy took me. It was gone. There are twenty-five boys here at a select school. They were playing down on the old football ground, and the voices and shouts, quips and jokes, were so natural that I could hardly help plunging down the hill, catching up a club, and going into the game of ball with all my old ardor.