A kind of dread had hitherto kept me back; but I was restless now, till I had accomplished my wish. I set out one morning to walk--I reached Widford about eleven in the forenoon--after a slight breakfast at my inn--where I was mortified to perceive the old landlord did not know me again--(old Thomas Billet--he has often made angle-rods for me when a child)--I rambled over all my accustomed haunts.
Our old house was vacant, and to be sold. I entered, unmolested, into the room that had been my bedchamber. I kneeled down on the spot where my little bed had stood--I felt like a child--I prayed like one--it seemed as though old times were to return again--I looked round involuntarily, expecting to see some face I knew--but all was naked and mute. The bed was gone. My little pane of painted window, through which I loved to look at the sun when I awoke in a fine summer's morning, was taken out, and had been replaced by one of common glass.
I visited, by turns, every chamber--they were all desolate and unfurnished, one excepted, in which the owner had left a harpsichord, probably to be sold--I touched the keys--I played some old Scottish tunes, which had delighted me when a child. Past associations revived with the music--blended with a sense of _unreality_, which at last became too powerful--I rushed out of the room to give vent to my feelings.
I wandered, scarce knowing where, into an old wood, that stands at the back of the house--we called it the _Wilderness_. A well-known _form_ was missing, that used to meet me in this place--it was thine--Ben Moxam--the kindest, gentlest, politest of human beings, yet was he nothing higher than a gardener in the family. Honest creature! thou didst never pass me in my childish rambles, without a soft speech, and a smile. I remember thy good-natured face. But there is one thing, for which I can never forgive thee, Ben Moxam--that thou didst join with an old maiden aunt of mine in a cruel plot, to lop away the hanging branches of the old fir-trees--I remember them sweeping to the ground.
I have often left my childish sports to ramble in this place--its glooms and its solitude had a mysterious charm for my young mind, nurturing within me that love of quietness and lonely thinking, which has accompanied me to maturer years.