What alterations--what sad havoc had time, circumstances, the hand of fortune, and the stroke of death, made among us since then! How were the thoughts of the heart, the hopes, the pursuits, the feelings changed; and, in almost every instance, it is to be feared, for the worse! As I gazed around me, and paused, I could not help reciting aloud to myself the lines of Charles Lamb, so touching in their simple beauty.
"I have had playmates, I have had companions, In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
Some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from me, all are departed; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." The fresh green plat, by the brink of the stream, lay before me.

It was there that we played at leap-frog, or gathered dandelions for our tame rabbits; and, at its western extremity, were still extant the reliques of the deal-seat, at which we used to assemble on autumn evenings to have our round of stories.

Many a witching tale and wondrous tradition hath there been told; many a marvel of "figures that visited the glimpses of the moon;" many a recital of heroic and chivalrous enterprise, accomplished ere warriors dwindled away to the mere puny-strength of mortals.

Sapped by the wind and rain, the planks lay in a sorely decayed and rotten state, looking in their mossiness like a sign-post of desolation, a memento of terrestrial instability.

Traces of the knife were still here and there visible upon the trunks of the supporting trees; and with little difficulty I could decipher some well-remembered initials.
"Cold were the hands that carved them there." It is, no doubt, wonderful that the human mind can retain such a mass of recollections; yet we seem to be, in general, little aware that for one solitary incident in our lives, preserved by memory, hundreds have been buried in the silent charnel-house of oblivion.