by the hand of violence! The ripping off of the shelter that has kept
out a thousand storms, the tearing off of the once ornamental woodwork,
the wrench of the inexorable crowbar, the murderous blows of the axe, the
progressive ruin, which ends by rending all the joints asunder and
flinging the tenoned and mortised timbers into heaps that will be sawed
and split to warm some new habitation as firewood,--what a brutal act of
destruction it seems!

Why should I go over the old house again, having already described it
more than ten years ago? Alas! how many remember anything they read but
once, and so long ago as that? How many would find it out if one should
say over in the same words that which he said in the last decade? But
there is really no need of telling the story a second time, for it can be
found by those who are curious enough to look it up in a volume of which
it occupies the opening chapter.

In order, however, to save any inquisitive reader that trouble, let me
remind him that the old house was General Ward's headquarters at the
breaking out of the Revolution; that the plan for fortifying Bunker's
Hill was laid, as commonly believed, in the southeast lower room, the
floor of which was covered with dents, made, it was alleged, by the butts
of the soldiers' muskets. In that house, too, General Warren probably
passed the night before the Bunker Hill battle, and over its threshold
must the stately figure of Washington have often cast its shadow.

But the house in which one drew his first breath, and where he one day
came into the consciousness that he was a personality, an ego, a little
universe with a sky over him all his own, with a persistent identity,
with the terrible responsibility of a separate, independent, inalienable
existence,--that house does not ask for any historical associations to