DOCTOR HOLMES

I have often been inside the old Holmes house in Cambridge. It served as
a boarding-house during our college days, but afterwards Professor James
B. Thayer rented it for a term of years, until it was finally swept away
like chaff by President Eliot's broom of reform. The popular notion that
it was a quaint-looking old mansion of the eighteenth century, which
seems to have been encouraged by Doctor Holmes himself, is a
misconception. It was a two-and-a-half story, low-studied house, such as
were built at the beginning of the last century, with a roof at an angle
of forty-five degrees and a two-story ell on the right side of the front
door. Doctor Holmes says:

"Gambrel, gambrel; let me beg
You will look at a horse's hinder leg.
First great angle above the hoof,--
That is the gambrel; hence gambrel roof."

Now, any one who looks carefully at the picture of the old Holmes
house, in Morse's biography of the Doctor, will perceive that this
was not the style of roof which the house had,--at least, in its later
years.

Doctor Holmes graduated at Harvard in 1829 at the age of twenty. His
class has been a celebrated one in Boston, and there were certainly some
good men in it,--especially Benjamin Pierce and James Freeman Clarke,--
but I think it was Doctor Holmes's class-poems that gave it its chief
celebrity, which, after all, means that it was a good deal talked about.
In one of these he said: