One day, in my enforced absence from the Club, my colleagues conspired against me, and with no regard to my feelings, selected me to write up some remembrances of old Beverly Farms. Hence these tears! Elsie Doane belongs to this Club. Elsie is _behind_ me about half a century, if you allow the Family Bible to know anything about so indifferent a thing as age. She was one of the few infants under my care when she was pupil and I was teacher, who had a real love for literature for literature's sake, and we had good chummy times when it was stormy and we carried dinner to school, and ate it peacefully in an atmosphere that smelt of a leaky furnace and fried doughnuts, in spite of open windows. It doesn't smell that way now, for Mr. Little has made the school-house of that day a pretty summer home for whomsoever will live in it. Elsie promises to set me right whenever I go astray as to what happened at old Beverly Farms, how it looked, what legends it had--how its people lived and behaved, and so forth, and so forth. She is a foxy little thing, and I suspect that when she is floored on my reminiscences, she will appeal to her mother, who, she says is older than she is! We do not promise any coherence in our stories. It will be somewhat of a hash that we shall give our listeners wherein it will be difficult to decide whether it is "fish, flesh, fowl, or good red herring." But we have no reporter at our Club, so we give our memories free rein. I often wish I could catch and fix, by the kodak of memory, some of the celebrities of my childhood, in this little village. What a character, for instance, was Uncle David Larcom! Among the old Puritans who were his ancestors, and among whom he was raised, what a constant surprise he must have been! Certainly no hero of a dime novel could have done more startling and audacious things. He ran off to sea in his youth and stayed away from the village for three years. During that time, he had seen and experienced enough to satisfy Tom Sawyer; he had messed with Indian Lascars and acquired a taste for curry and red pepper which he never lost. And with the love for stimulating diet he gained a love for stimulating stories, and could draw the very longest kind of an innocent bow, that carried far and never hurt anybody. Who could forget his yarns of the sea serpent and his life on the old English Brig? "Has he got to the old English brig?" his waggish son would inquire, as he listened from an adjoining room. He gave away a wonderful old mirror, beautifully carved, with a lion's head at the bottom, and a boy astride a goose at the top, with leaves and bunches of grapes at the sides, and glass, as it seems to me, almost an inch thick. It hangs now in the drawing room of its possessor restored to pristine beauty and bearing an inscription setting forth that it came from the wreck of the "Schooner Hesperus."