The Old Holmes House.

Among the events which have rendered the past year memorable to me has been the demolition of that venerable and interesting old dwelling-house, precious for its intimate association with the earliest stages of the was of the Resolution, and sacred to me as my birth-place and the home of my boyhood.

It is a great blessing to be born surrounded by a natural horizon. The Old Gambrel-roofed House could not boast an unbroken ring of natural objects encircling it. Northerly it looked upon its own outbuildings and some unpretending two-story house which had been its neighbors for a century or more. To the south of it the square brick dormitories and the befriend hall of the university helped to shut out the distant view. But the west windows gave a broad outlook across the common, beyond which the historical "Washington elm" and two companions in line with it spread their leaves in summer and their networks in winter. And far away rose the hills that bounded the view, with the glimmer here and there of the white walls or the illuminated casements of some embowered. half-hidden villa. Eastwardly also, the prospect was, in my earlier remembrance, widely open, and I have frequently seen the sunlit sails gliding along as if through the level fields, for no water was visible. So there were broad expanses on two sides at least, for my imagination to wander over.

What strides the great Universi8ty has taken ! During all my early years our old Harvard Alma Mater sat still and lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert. Then all at once, like the commander's statue in Don Giovanni, she moved from her pedestal. The fall of that "story foot" has effected a miracle like the harp that Orphens played, like the teeth which Cadmus sowed. The plain where the moose and the bear were wandering while Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, where a few plain dormitories and other needed buildings were scattered about in my school-boy days, groans under the weight of the massive edifices which have s rung up all around them, crowned by the tower of that noble structure which stands in full view before me as I lift my eyes from the portfolio on the back of which I am now writing.-Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Atlantic.