Another awful figure haunted the same neighborhood,--"Old Britt," a street sot,--an old, filthy, unshorn hog of a man, moving in a halo of rags and effluvium,--whom I used to meet lurching along the pavement, or sometimes prone by the roadside in a nauseous rummy sleep. Him I passed by with a wide circuit of fear and disgust and detestation. My local attachments must have been stunted, like the roots of plants often transplanted. They twine close and strong about no place. How could they, when in my native city alone--not to mention the six other towns where I have sojourned, four of whose names begin with the syllable "New"--I can count twenty houses where I remember to have lived? The Wandering Jew is a parable for a tenant housekeeper that "moves" every spring; and I might be his son. Cursed be moving! What a long list of houses! There is the A---- house, which I dimly recollect, and where I think we had some beehives; the S---- house, where we boarded, and I fell down and broke a bone; the L---- house, where also we boarded, and there were many young girls. There I dreamed of an angel,--a person about eight feet long, flying along past the second-story side-windows, in the conventional horizontal attitude, so suggestive of a "crick in the neck," with great, wide wings, tooting through a trumpet as long as himself; and out of each temple, as I distinctly remember, grew a thing like a knitting-needle, with a cherry on the end. There was also the Cl---- house, where was a tree of horrible, nauseating red plums; the W---- house, quaint and many-gabled; the C---- house, where I had my last whipping. Ah, that whipping,--those other whippings! How resolutely did they each make me vow that the next ugly thing which I could safely do should surely be done! A whipping inflicted upon a child old enough to remember it is almost certainly a horrible mistake. No one knows how often it happens that a child's sense of personal insult or degradation, though incapable of expression, is every whit as quick and deep as a man's. Other houses I remember,--in broad streets, narrow streets,--in close-built blocks, in open outskirts,--even a mile or two away among the green fields,--lived in, boarded in. I am cheated in heart by injurious superfluity of houses. One home, remembered alone, would stand embowered forever,--if not among ancestral trees and vines, then in clustering memories far more lovely and more cherished. But what dignity or beauty or quiet or distinctness can attach to the score of tenements that scurry helter-skelter through my memory? It is little better than the vision of the drunken men-at-arms in the castle of the parodist:-- "Then straight there did appear, to each gallant Gorbalier, _Forty_ castles dancing near, all around!" An unblest memory!