_July 29, 1881_.--After more than forty years' absence, (except a
brief visit, to take my father there once more, two years before he
died,) went down Long Island on a week' s jaunt to the place where
I was born, thirty miles from New York city. Rode around the old
familiar spots, viewing and pondering and dwelling long upon them,
every-thing coming back to me. Went to the old Whitman homestead on
the upland and took a view eastward, inclining south, over the broad
and beautiful farm lands of my grandfather (1780,) and my father.
There was the new house (1810,) the big oak a hundred and fifty or two
hundred years old; there the well, the sloping kitchen-garden, and
a little way off even the well-kept remains of the dwelling of my
great-grandfather (1750-'60) still standing, with its mighty timbers
and low ceilings. Near by, a stately grove of tall, vigorous
black-walnuts, beautiful, Apollo-like, the sons or grandsons, no
doubt, of black-walnuts during or before 1776. On the other side of
the road spread the famous apple orchard, over twenty acres, the trees
planted by hands long mouldering in the grave (my uncle Jesse's,) but
quite many of them evidently capable of throwing out their annual
blossoms and fruit yet.

I now write these lines seated on an old grave (doubtless of a
century since at least) on the burial hill of the Whitmans of many
generations. Fifty or more graves are quite plainly traceable, and
as many more decay'd out of all form--depress'd mounds, crumbled and
broken stones, cover'd with moss--the gray and sterile hill, the
clumps of chestnuts outside, the silence, just varied by the soughing
wind. There is always the deepest eloquence of sermon or poem in any
of these ancient graveyards of which Long Island has so many; so what
must this one have been to me? My whole family history, with its