precious for its intimate association with the earliest stages of the war
of the Revolution, and sacred to me as my birthplace and the home of my
boyhood.

The "Old Gambrel-roofed House" exists no longer. I remember saying
something, in one of a series of papers published long ago, about the
experience of dying out of a house,--of leaving it forever, as the soul
dies out of the body. We may die out of many houses, but the house
itself can die but once; and so real is the life of a house to one who
has dwelt in it, more especially the life of the house which held him in
dreamy infancy, in restless boyhood, in passionate youth,--so real, I
say, is its life, that it seems as if something like a soul of it must
outlast its perishing frame.

The slaughter of the Old Gambrel-roofed House was, I am ready to admit, a
case of justifiable domicide. Not the less was it to be deplored by all
who love the memories of the past. With its destruction are obliterated
some of the footprints of the heroes and martyrs who took the first steps
in the long and bloody march which led us through the wilderness to the
promised land of independent nationality. Personally, I have a right to
mourn for it as a part of my life gone from me. My private grief for its
loss would be a matter for my solitary digestion, were it not that the
experience through which I have just passed is one so familiar to my
fellow-countrymen that, in telling my own reflections and feelings, I am
repeating those of great numbers of men and women who have had the
misfortune to outlive their birthplace.

It is a great blessing to be born surrounded by a natural horizon. The
Old Gambrel-roofed House could not boast an unbroken ring of natural
objects encircling it. Northerly it looked upon its own outbuildings and