“If you, Gentle Reader, found your first gray hair day before yesterday morning, if you can remember, ’way back ten or fifteen years ago—er—er—or more, come with me. Let us go ‘Back Home.’ Here’s your transportation, all made out to you, and in your hand. It is no use my reminding you that no railroad goes to the old place. It isn’t there any more, even in outward seeming. Cummins’s woods, where you had your robbers’ cave, is all cleared off and cut up into building lots. The cool and echoing covered bridge, plastered with notices of dead and forgotten Strawberry Festivals and Public Vendues, has long ago been torn down, to be replaced by a smart, red iron bridge. The Volunteer Firemen’s Engine-house, whose brick wall used to flutter with the gay rags of circus-bills, is gone as if it never were at all. Where the Union School-house was is all torn up now. They are putting up a new magnificent structure, with all the modern improvements, exposed plumbing, and spankless discipline. The quiet, leafy streets echo to the hissing snarl of trolley cars, and the power-house is right by the Old Swimming-hole above the dam. The meeting-house, where we attended Sabbath-school, and marveled at the Greek temple frescoed on the wall behind the pulpit, is now a church with a big organ, and stained-glass windows, and folding opera-chairs on a slanting floor. There isn’t any “Amen Corner,” any more, and in these calm and well-ordered times nobody ever gets “shouting happy”. “But even when “the loved spots that our infancy knew” are physically the same, a change has come upon them more saddening than words can tell. They have shrunken and grown shabbier. They are not nearly so spacious and so splendid as once they were. “Some one comes up to you and calls you by your name. His voice echoes in the chambers of your memory. You hold his hand in yours and try to peer through the false-face he has on, the mask of a beard or spectacles, or a changed expression of the countenance. He says he is So-and-so. Why, he used to sit with you in Miss Crutcher’s room, don’t you remember? There was a time when you and he walked together, your arms upon each other’s shoulders. But this is some other than he. The boy you knew had freckles, and could spit between his teeth, ever and ever so far. “They don’t have the same things to eat they used to have, or, if they do, it all tastes different. Do you remember the old well, with the windlass and chain fastened to the rope just above the bucket, the chain that used to cluck-cluck when the dripping bucket came within reach to be swung upon the well-curb? How cold the water used to be, right out of the north-west corner of the well! It made the roof of your mouth ache when you drank. Everybody said it was such splendid water. It isn’t so very cold these days, and I think it has a sort of funny taste to it.