“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; 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 Revolution 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 in that little office in the yard, the successive classes of law students that received that teaching which has so often honored both bar and bench. Here, too, we stop 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 it. 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? “But Dr. Sheldon’s house is all right. Dear old Dr. Sheldon! We began to get well as soon as he came into the house; or if the evil spirit delayed a little, ‘Cream-o’-tartar’ with hot water poured upon it and sweetened, finished the work. He had learned long before the days of homeopathy, that a doctor’s chief business is to keep parents from giving their children medicine, so that nature may have a fair chance at the disease without having its attention divided or diverted.