Being left to myself, up there, I went on picking out old houses in the distant town, and calling back their former inmates out of the moldy past.

Among them I presently recognized the house of the father of Lem Hackett (fictitious name).

It carried me back more than a generation in a moment, and landed me in the midst of a time when the happenings of life were not the natural and logical results of great general laws, but of special orders, and were freighted with very precise and distinct purposes--partly punitive in intent, partly admonitory; and usually local in application.
When I was a small boy, Lem Hackett was drowned--on a Sunday.

He fell out of an empty flat-boat, where he was playing.

Being loaded with sin, he went to the bottom like an anvil.