16 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 



must keep pigs in the orchard to root up the 

 ground and eat the wormy fruit as it falls ; but 

 under these conditions I would rather not 

 have the apples. The orchard is old; why not 

 leave it to dream and rest and dream again? 



The old associations are, I admit, of a 

 somewhat mixed character. There is the 

 romance of the milk-room door, through 

 which, in hoary ages past, the &quot;hired girl,&quot; 

 at the ripe age of tw r elve, eloped with her 

 sixteen-year-old lover; there is the story of 

 the cellar nail, a shuddery one, handed down 

 from a yet more remote antiquity; there are 

 tales of the &quot; ballroom&quot; on the second floor, of 

 the old lightning-riven locust stump, of the 

 origin of the &quot;new wing&quot; of the house still 

 called &quot;new,&quot; though a century old. Not a 

 spot, indoors or out, but has its clustering 

 memories. 



Such an enveloping atmosphere of associa 

 tions, no matter what their quality, in a place 

 where generations have lived and died, is of 

 itself a quieting thing. Life, incrusted with 

 tradition, like a ship weighted with barnacles, 

 moves more and more slowly; the past ap 

 pears more real than the present. To the old 



