HERE is always a pleasure mingled with sadness in retrospect. A glamour of more or less rosy tinge envelopes the past, and places and incidents stand out sharply defined against the hazy background of the half forgotten. We love the haunts and scenes of our childhood; they draw us with resistless force; we revisit them with sweet pleasure tinged with the bitter realization that the springs of youth are drying up, that age is staring us in the face, and that "the hereafter" lies across our path, an unknown and undiscovered country in which each must be a pioneer.

"The Old North End!" There is music in the very name, a conservatism, a sound of strength, a restfulness, a peacefulness, at least, to me. Is it my imagination?

There it is, unchanged, and yet so changed. The same broad streets, the same old trees (a few missing), the same old houses. Other parts of the city have grown, have expanded;

new streets have shot out, like young twigs on a hardy willow; ornate modern houses, with towers, cupolas, fancy piazzas, and all that the latter-day architect can devise to hide the lines of grace and beauty, have sprung up; great brick blocks line the business streets; public buildings, both costly and architecturally good, adorn the central portion; but the "Old North End" goes peacefully on, undisturbed by the march of time, and regardless of the pushings and elbowings of the ambitious present.

The centre of the city is for business, for traffic, with its brick and mortar, its noisy pavements, its push and bustle; the South End was the necessary pushing out of the city as it grew in size; while the West End represents the new, the spirit of the times, the fin de siècle. But, when you cross a certain street above the business centre, you come into the peacefulness and quiet of "The Old North End," undisturbed by trade, unmoved by modernism, stretching its roots deep into the past, yes, even

to the very beginning, and permanent and steadfast as her grand old elms, which rear their lofty branches into the infinite,-emblems of constancy and strength. Perhaps the best way to describe it would be to call it the place of homes, and what dearer word is there than that word, home?

I wish to speak of it as I rememit when a boy,-not so very long ago, yet a quarter of a century is quite a period, and while few changes have taken place in its outward appearance, in its personnel, how changed! At the time of which I speak, the arch of great elms extended south as far as Chapel street, and there was a row of magnificent trees on the east side even as far south as Pitman street. In front of the old Morrill house, now gone, a row of Lombardy poplars stood, like a file of prim and erect sentinels, against the sky. No

one knows exactly the reason of the death of all the trees on this side of the street, but they went, one by one, and people generally laid the blame at the door of the gas company.

When all these trees were living, the view, as you came up the street, through this long, overarching avenue of green foliage was extremely beautiful, particularly at sunset, when the glow of the western sky showed through the opening at the north. If people knew the benefit to a city, and the perpetual delight to its people of fine trees, they would take more pains in planting and rearing them. Let us be as thoughtful and far-seeing for those who are to come after us as our forefathers were for their descendants.

"The Old North End" is bounded on the east by Fort Eddy, on the north by Horse Shoe pond, and on

the west by a range of wooded hills,

all points of interest to me as a boy. A large part of my childhood was spent in and on (more in than on) the waters of Horse Shoe pond. It was a somewhat larger sheet of water than it is now, part of it having been drained off. I always kept a boat or a canoe at what was called "the swimming hole," at the lower end near the ice-house, and early morning usually found me cruising after pond lilies, or wading for cato-nine-tails among the intricate passages which intersected the northern end of the pond. We had all sorts of secret ways, hidden brush-covered tunnels, and snug hiding-places in this haunt of the blackbird, bobolink, and blue jay. Birds' eggs, too, were plentiful there, and it was a perfect paradise for a small boy. On a bit of firm ground in the midst of this waste of water and bushes we had a wigwam, fully equipped with all the implements of wild life and the chase.

And those soft, warm waters on a hot July day! How they cooled and refreshed one as he plunged and frolicked about, as perfectly at home as a sea-urchin in his native element. We used to spend hours and hours, either in the water or lying in the hot sand, in a state of nature. We begrudged the hours we had to spend in school when it was in session, and no sooner had the bell clanged our welcome release, than we raced with the speed of young colts towards the pond, and by the time we had reached Hon. Joseph B. Walker's house, we had divested ourselves of every stitch of clothing as we ran, and plunging down the steep bank, dropped our clothes at the water's edge, and with a yell of delight, disappeared in the