A few years ago the Academy did burn, and the news came to me with a far keener pang than that felt in childhood at the false alarm. The present was momentarily blotted out. My thoughts flew back to the old building where the most tender and beautiful memories centred. Of that place so rich in associations only ashes remained; only in memory could I see again the old brick walls--the walls my grandfather had helped to build--only in memory hear the school bell ring! Curious, but more than all the furnishings--the books, the globes, the maps and charts, the chemical apparatus--more than all the things really of value in the building, my thoughts kept going back perversely to that dear little wire frame with coloured balls which I had so cherished since my first day at school!--_that_ was gone past recall!--that and the old bell! At those earlier home-comings after graduation, one of my keenest pleasures had been to be awakened in the morning by the sound of the school bell; it brought back so much: I was a girl again; the past was bridged over; it stirred a host of chaotic feelings of mingled sweetness and sadness--longing for my lost girlhood, and exultation at the successes and achievements of to-day--the Spell of the Past was in that bell. A fine high-school building, well equipped, now stands where the old Academy stood. To the younger generation it will doubtless mean all that the old school meant to us, but how like an interloper it is! Only the ground and the old trees are left--the old linden trees under which we played, where we used to gather the tiny round nuts and eat the sweet brown kernels that ripen in September! Once when Sister was a little thing, perhaps four or five years old, and an aunt, in telling her Bible stories, started to make some explanation about God, Kate interrupted her in a superior way with, “Oh, yes, I know God--he lives over there,” pointing to a meadow opposite our house. Astonished, Aunt Kate inquired further, when the child added: “He’s got white hair and wears a long coat; he walks around there when it’s getting dark.” She meant an old man with a white beard and flowing locks who, like Old Grimes, wore a “long gray coat all buttoned down before.” His unusual appearance as he came and went in the hay-meadows had appealed to the child’s imagination, and she had settled to her own satisfaction that he was God!