rning and
three in the afternoon. The weather was hot and the air in the Orchard
House was drowsy. There were many outside attractions, and more and more
I was tempted to leave the philosophers to reason high--

Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate--
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute--

while I wandered off through the woods for a bath in Walden, some one
and a half miles away, through whose transparent waters the pebbles on
the bottom could be plainly seen at a depth of thirty feet. Sometimes I
went farther afield to White Pond, described by Thoreau, or Baker Farm,
sung by Ellery Channing. A pleasant young fellow at Miss Emma Barrett's
boarding house, who had no philosophy, but was a great hand at picnics
and boating and black-berrying parties, paddled me up the Assabeth, or
North Branch, in his canoe, and drove me over to Longfellow's Wayside
Inn at Sudbury. And so it happens that, when I look back at my fortnight
at Concord, what I think of is not so much the murmurous auditorium of
the Orchard House, as the row of colossal sycamores along the village
sidewalk that led us thither, whose smooth, mottled trunks in the
moonlight resembled a range of Egyptian temple columns. Or I haunt again
at twilight the grounds of the Old Manse, where Hawthorne wrote his
"Mosses," and the grassy lane beside it leading down to the site of the
rude bridge and the first battlefield of the Revolution. Here were the
headstones of the two British soldiers, buried where they fell; here the
Concord monument erected in 1836:

On this green bank, by this soft stream
We set to-day a votive stone:
That memory may their deed redeem
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

In the field across the river was the spirited statue of the minuteman,
designed by young Daniel Chester French, a Concord boy who has since
distinguished himself as a sculptor in wider fields and more imposing
works.

The social life of Concord, judging from such glimpses as could be had
of it, was peculiar. It was the life of a village community, marked by
the friendly simplicity of country neighbors, but marked also by unusual
intellectual distinction and an addiction to "the things of the mind."
The town was not at all provincial, or what the Germans call
_kleinstaedtisch_:--cosmopolitan, rather, as lying on the highway of
thought. It gave one a thrill, for example, to meet Mr. Emerson coming
from the Post