Nor does he forget to recall a visit to Haverhill with his room-mate, when he saw the mighty bridge over the Merrimac that defied the ice-rafts of the river, and the old meeting-house door with the bullet-hole in it, through which the minister, Benjamin Rolfe, was shot by the Indians. "What a vision it was," he exclaims, "when I awoke in the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped the towers and spires of a great city! for such was my fancy, and whether it was a mirage of youth, or a fantastic natural effect, I hate to inquire too nicely." Like all poets, Doctor Holmes had a passionate love for flowers, and with a delight that is most heartily shared by the sympathetic reader, he thus recalls the old garden belonging to the gambrel-roofed house in Cambridge. "There were old lilac bushes, at the right of the entrance, and in the corner at the left that remarkable moral pear-tree, which gave me one of my first lessons in life. Its fruit never ripened but always rotted at the core just before it began to grow mellow. It was a vulgar plebeian specimen, at best, and was set there, no doubt, only to preach its annual sermon, a sort of 'Dudleian Lecture' by a country preacher of small parts. But in the northern border was a high-bred Saint Michael pear-tree, which taught a lesson that all of gentle blood might take to heart; for its fruit used to get hard and dark, and break into unseemly cracks, so that when the lord of the harvest came for it, it was like those rich men's sons we see too often, who have never ripened, but only rusted, hardened and shrunken. We had peaches, lovely nectarines, and sweet, white grapes, growing and coming to kindly maturity in those days; we should hardly expect them now, and yet there is no obvious change of climate. As for the garden-beds, they were cared for by the Jonathan or Ephraim of the household, sometimes assisted by one Rule, a little old Scotch gardener, with a stippled face and a lively temper. Nothing but old-fashioned flowers in them--hyacinths, pushing their green beaks through as soon as the snow was gone, or earlier tulips, coming up in the shape of sugar 'cockles,' or cornucopiæ, one was almost tempted to look to see whether nature had not packed one of those two-line 'sentiments,' we remember so well in each of them; peonies, butting their way bluntly through the loosened earth; flower-de-luces (so I will call them, not otherwise); lilies; roses, damask, white, blush, cinnamon (these names served us then); larkspurs, lupins, and gorgeous holyhocks.