touch and taste.

Thus it happened that when I, a child, with my brothers and sisters,
were taken to visit the town we would become more and more excited as
we approached it at the end of a long journey, which usually took us
two days, at all we saw--ox-carts and carriages and men on horseback on
the wide hot dusty road, and the houses and groves and gardens on
either side.... It was thus that we became acquainted with the two
white houses, and were attracted to them because in their whiteness and
green shade they looked beautiful to us and cool and restful, and we
wished we could live in them.

They were well outside of the town, the nearest being about two miles
from its old south wall and fortifications, the other one a little over
two miles further out. The last being the farthest out was the first
one we came to on our journeys to the city; it was a somewhat singular-
looking building with a verandah supported by pillars painted green,
and it had a high turret. And near it was a large dovecot with a cloud
of pigeons usually flying about it, and we came to calling it Dovecot
House. The second house was plainer in form but was not without a
peculiar distinction in its large wrought-iron front gate with white
pillars on each side, and in front of each pillar a large cannon
planted postwise in the earth.

This we called Cannon House, but who lived in these two houses none
could tell us.

When I was old enough to ride as well as any grown-up, and my
occasional visits to town were made on horseback, I once had three
young men for my companions, the oldest about twenty-eight, the two not