Ah! there was a foam, a sparkle, a sort of frost-work fizzling upon those mead-glasses, which we shall never see again, Jeremy!—NEVER! Champagne, bubble it ever so brightly, pales in its ineffectual rivalry with the memory of the snowy effervescence, which crowned the goblet at “BAMFORD’S!” With the freshness of life’s morning, has “BAMFORD” and his “_imperial_” melted away! and the place which knew them and us is known no more. The old blue frame, with an attic in its _first_ story, and its _window_ all awry, is gone!—as if to join those bright dreams which have floated into the unattainable. The very dew of the heart of each of _us_ has been exhaled, and with those laughing hours has gone, upward we trust, to enjoy sunshine and smiles with the angels. Do you know that I cannot look upon the staring brick edifice which covers that hallowed ground, without thinking it a desecration? and feeling a sort of unbidden wish for a circumscribed earthquake! Is it not enough that the heart shrivels and grows cold in its calloused casement, under the blighting influences of the god of this world—that Mammon must bridge over and entomb the small spot that memory has consecrated to truth; so that the scared conscience shall be watered no more at the fountain at which in youth the heart’s secrets of each of us were mirrored. Must even the green places which we remember in the past be obliterated forever?—the points from which, with imprisoned impulses and high hopes, we started into that untried and beckoning world, which, as a prism to the young eye, varied its fanciful and attractive colors as we advanced, forever changing, forever deceptive, until the heart, jaded and wearied with the cheat, started from its dreams of bliss, to dream—to hope—no more. It _is_ enough that the heart changes—that all that we looked forward to in youth, hopefully and trustfully, fades as we advance. That the path which before us was verdant and full of flowers, is sterile and strewn with ashes, as we tread it now; and instead of the songs of birds, which filled the grove and made the air vocal, and the heart happy, we have but the melancholy dirge—the funeral wail of autumn—sweeping with moaning sound through the unleafed trees—a sad sky above our heads—and withered leaves beneath our feet!