to neighboring villages, or for the woodman's team, it once
amused the traveller more than now by its variety, and lingered longer
in his memory. Where now firm open fields stretch from the village to
the woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs,
the remnants of which, doubtless, still underlie the present dusty
highway, from the Stratton, now the Alms-House Farm, to Brister's Hill.

East of my bean-field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham, slave of
Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman, of Concord village, who built his
slave a house, and gave him permission to live in Walden Woods;--Cato,
not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he was a Guinea Negro.
There are a few who remember his little patch among the walnuts, which
he let grow up till he should be old and need them; but a younger and
whiter speculator got them at last. He too, however, occupies an equally
narrow house at present. Cato's half-obliterated cellar-hole still
remains, though known to few, being concealed from the traveller by a
fringe of pines. It is now filled with the smooth sumach (Rhus glabra),
and one of the earliest species of goldenrod (Solidago stricta) grows
there luxuriantly.

Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town, Zilpha,
a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen for the
townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing, for
she had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the war of 1812, her
dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers, prisoners on parole, when
she was away, and her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together.
She led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old frequenter of these
woods remembers, that as he passed her house one noon he heard her
muttering to herself over her gurgling pot--"Ye are all bones, bones!" I
have seen bricks amid the oak copse there.

Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister's Hill, lived Brister
Freeman, "a handy Negro," slave of Squire Cummings once--there where
grow still the apple trees which Brister planted and tended; large old
trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. Not long
since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on
one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell
in the retreat from Concord--where he is styled "Sippio Brister"--Scipio
Africanus he had some title to be called--"a man of color," as if he
were discolore