les of the work-worn factory-girls stream by, with no
concern for them but to see which was pretty and which was plain, and
with no dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten hours' work
a day in those hideous mills and lodged them in the barracks where they
rested from their toil.

I wonder if there is a stage that still runs between Lowell and Concord,
past meadow walls, and under the caressing boughs of way-side elms, and
through the bird-haunted gloom of woodland roads, in the freshness of the
summer morning? By a blessed chance I found that there was such a stage
in 1860, and I took it from my hotel, instead of going back to Boston and
up to Concord as I must have had to do by train. The journey gave me the
intimacy of the New England country as I could have had it in no other
fashion, and for the first time I saw it in all the summer sweetness
which I have often steeped my soul in since. The meadows were newly
mown, and the air was fragrant with the grass, stretching in long winrows
among the brown bowlders, or capped with canvas in the little haycocks it
had been gathered into the day before. I was fresh from the affluent
farms of the Western Reserve, and this care of the grass touched me with
a rude pity, which I also bestowed on the meagre fields of corn and
wheat; but still the land was lovelier than any I had ever seen, with its
old farmhouses, and brambled gray stone walls, its stony hillsides, its
staggering orchards, its wooded tops, and its thick-brackened valleys.
From West to East the difference was as great as I afterwards found it
from America to Europe, and my impression of something quaint and strange
was no keener when I saw Old England the next year than when I saw New
England now. I had imagined the landscape bare of trees, and I was
astonished to find it almost as full of them as at home, though they all
looked very little, as they well might to eyes used to the primeval
forests of Ohio. The road ran through them from time to time, and took
their coolness on its smooth hard reaches, and then issued again in the
glisten of the open fields.

I made phrases to myself about the scenery as we drove along; and yes, I
suppose I made phrases about the young girl who was one of the inside
passengers, and who, when the common strangeness had somewhat worn off,
began to sing, and sang most of the way to Concord. Perhaps she was not
very sage, and I am sure she was not of the caste of Vere de Vere