n Scientists are Transcendentalists
whose distinguishing point is that they secrete millinery--California
quail with rainbow tints and topknots, Balboaic instincts well defined.

* * * * *

Let this fact stand: it was Emerson who made Concord. He saw it
first--he was on the ground, and the place was his by right of
discovery, the title strengthened by the fact that four of his ancestors
had been Concord clergymen, and the most excellent and venerable Doctor
Ripley, a near kinsman.

Concord and Emerson, as early as Eighteen Hundred Forty, when Emerson
was thirty-seven years old, were synonymous. He had defied the
traditions of Harvard, been excommunicated by his Alma Mater, published
his pantheistic Essay on Nature, and his thin little books and sermons
had been placed on the Boston Theological Index Expurgatorius.

Through it all he had remained gentle, smiling, sympathetic,
unresentful.

The world can never spare the man who does his work and holds his peace.
Emerson was being lifted up, and souls were being drawn unto him.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty, Bronson Alcott, the American Socrates, with
his interesting family, moved to Concord, drawn thither by the magnet of
Emerson's personality. Louisa wore short dresses, and used to pick wild
blackberries and sell them to the Emersons and get goodly reward in
silver, and kindly smiles, and pats on her brown head by the hand that
wrote "Compensation."

Alcott was a great, honest, sincere soul, and a true anarch, for he
took his own wherever he saw it. He used to run his wheelbarrow into
Emerson's garden and load it up with potatoes, cabbages or turnips, and
once in response to a hint that the vegetables were private property,
the old man somewhat petulantly exclaimed, "I need them!--I need them!"

And that was all: anything that any man needed was his by divine right.
And the consistency of Alcott's philosophy was shown in that he never
took anything or any more than he needed, and if he had something that
you needed, you were certainly welcome to it. If Alcott helped himself
to the thrifty Emerson's vegetables, both Emerson and Thoreau helped
themselves to Alcott's ideas.

Once a wagonload of wood broke down in front of Alcott's house, and the
farmer unhitched his horses and went on to the village to procure a new
wheel. Before he got back, Alcott had carried every stick of the
combustibles into his own wood-shed. "Providence remember