There was his old house
still standing, but deserted, with all the windows boarded up, and the
door likewise, and the chimneys removed,--a most desolate-looking place.
A young dog came barking towards me as I approached,--barking, but
frisking, between play and watchfulness. Within fifty yards of the old
house, farther back from the road, stands a stone house, of some dozen
or twenty years' endurance,--an ugly affair, so plain is it,--which was
built by the old man in his latter days. The well of the old house, out
of which I have often drunk, and over the curb of which I have peeped to
see my own boy-visage closing the far vista below, seems to be still in
use for the new edifice. Passing on a little farther, I came to a brook,
which, I remember, the old man's son and I dammed up, so that it almost
overflowed the road. The stream has strangely shrunken now; it is a mere
ditch, indeed, and almost a dry one. Going a little farther, I came to a
graveyard by the roadside,--not apparently a public graveyard, but the
resting-place of a family or two, with half a dozen gravestones. On two
marble stones, standing side by side, I read the names of Benjamin
Foster and Anstiss Foster, the people whom I used to be brought to
visit.
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