THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY BUILDINGS, ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS.
CHAPTERS FROM A LIFE.
By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
Author of "The Gates Ajar," "The Madonna of the Tubs," etc.
LIFE IN ANDOVER BEFORE THE WAR.
NDOVER is—or Andover was—like the lady to whom Steele gave immortality in the finest and most famous epigram ever offered to woman.
To have loved Andover; to have been born in Andover—I am brought up short, in these notes, by the sudden recollection that I was not born in Andover. It has always been so difficult to believe it, that I am liable any day to forget it; but the facts compel me to infer that I was born within a mile of the State House. I must have become a citizen of Andover at the age of three, when my father resigned his Boston pulpit for the professorship of Rhetoric in Andover Seminary. I remember distinctly our arrival at the white mansion with the large, handsome grounds, the distant and mysterious grove, the rotund horse-chestnut trees, venerable and solemn, nearly a century old—to this day a horse-chestnut always seems to me like a theological trustee—and the sweep of playground so vast, so soft, so green, so fragrant, so clean, that the baby cockney ran imperiously to her father and demanded that he go build her a brick sidewalk to play upon.