quite wild," he wrote a quarter-century later, "and would, I doubt not,
have willingly run wild till this time, fishing all day long, or
shooting with an old fowling-piece; but reading a good deal, too, on
rainy days, especially in Shakespeare and 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' and
any poetry or light books within my reach. These were delightful
days.... I would skate all alone on Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows
of the icy hills on either hand. When I found myself far from home, and
weary with the exhaustion of skating, I would sometimes take refuge in a
log cabin where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth. I
would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the stars through the great
aperture through which the flames went roaring up. Ah, how well I recall
the summer days, also, when with my gun I roamed at will through the
woods of Maine!" In these memories, it is evident, many years, younger
and older, are diffused in one recollection. For him, here rather than
by his native sea were those open places of freedom that boyhood loves,
and with them he associated the beginnings of his spirit,--the dark as
well as the bright; near his end he told Fields, as his mind wandered
back to these days, "I lived in Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect
was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I first got my cursed habits
of solitude." The tone of these reminiscences is verified by his
letters, when he went back to Salem; in the first months he writes of
"very hard fits of homesickness;" a year later he breaks out,--"Oh, that
I had the wings of a dove, that I might fly hence and be at rest! How
often do I long for my gun, and wish that I could again savageize with
you! But I shall never again run wild in Raymond, and I shall never be
so happy as when I did;" and, after another year's interval, "I have
preferred and still prefer Raymond to Salem, through every change of
fortune." There can be no doubt where his heart placed the home of his
boyhood; nor is it, perhaps, fanciful to observe that in his books the
love of nature he displays is rather for the woods than the sea, though