Not far from the ancient and monumental tree lay a small sheet of water,
once agile with life and vocal with evening melodies, but now stirred
only by the swallow as he dips his wing, or by the morning bath of the
English sparrows, those high-headed, thick-bodied, full-feeding,
hot-tempered little John Bulls that keep up such a swashing and swabbing
and spattering round all the water basins, one might think from the fuss
they make about it that a bird never took a bath here before, and that
they were the missionaries of ablution to the unwashed Western world.

There are those who speak lightly of this small aqueous expanse, the eye
of the sacred enclosure, which has looked unwinking on the happy faces of
so many natives and the curious features of so many strangers. The music
of its twilight minstrels has long ceased, but their memory lingers like
an echo in the name it bears. Cherish it, inhabitants of the two-hilled
city, once three-hilled; ye who have said to the mountain, "Remove
hence," and turned the sea into dry land! May no contractor fill his
pockets by undertaking to fill thee, thou granite girdled lakelet, or
drain the civic purse by drawing off thy waters! For art thou not the
Palladium of our Troy? Didst thou not, like the Divine image which was
the safeguard of Ilium, fall from the skies, and if the Trojan could look
with pride upon the heaven-descended form of the Goddess of Wisdom,
cannot he who dwells by thy shining oval look in that mirror and
contemplate Himself,--the Native of Boston.

There must be some fatality which carries our young men and maidens in
the direction of the Common when they have anything very particular to
exchange their views about. At any rate I remember two of our young
friends brought up here a good many years ago, and I understand that
there is one path across the enclosure which a young man must not ask a
young woman to take with him unless he means business, for an action will
hold--for breach of promise, if she consents to accompany him, and he
chooses to forget his obligations:

Our two young people stood at the western edge of the little pool,
studying astronomy in the reflected firmament. The Pleiades were
trembling in the wave before them, and the three great stars of
Orion,--for these constellations were both glittering in the eastern sky.

"There is no place too humble for the glories of heaven to shine in," she
said.

"And their splendor makes even this lit