He asked Mr. Hoar what he should pay, and father said, "Five dollars." Mr. Adams paid it at once, and father said, "By the way, there is a little trouble with my pump. It does not draw. Will you just look at it?" So Mr. Adams went around the corner of the shed, moved the handle of the pump, and put his hand down and fixed a little spigot which was in the side, which had got loose, and the pump worked perfectly. Father said, "Thank you, sir." To which Adams replied: "It will be five dollars, Mr. Hoar," and father gave him back the same bill he had just taken.

I am afraid the sympathy of the people who told the story was with the pump-maker and not with the lawyer.

The great kitchen fireplace presented a very cheerful appearance compared with the black range or stove of to-day. It was from six to eight or ten feet wide, with a great chimney. In many houses you could stand on the hearth and look up the chimney and see the stars on a winter night. Across the fireplace hung an iron crane, which swung on a hinge or pivot, from which hung a large number of what were called pothooks and trammels. From these were suspended the great kettles and little kettles and the griddles and pots and boilers for the cooking processes.

The roasting was done in a big "tin kitchen," which stood before the fire, in which meats or poultry were held by a large iron spit, which pierced them and which could be revolved to present one side after the other to the blaze. Sometimes there was a little clockwork which turned the spit automatically, but usually it was turned round from time to time by the cook. As you know, they used to have in England little dogs called turnspits, trained to turn a wheel for this purpose. A little door in the rear of this tin kitchen gave access for basting the meat. In the large trough at the bottom the gravy was caught.

No boy of that day will think there is any flavor like that of roast turkey and chicken or of the doughnuts and pancakes or griddle-cakes which were cooked by these open fires.

By the side of the fireplace, with a flue entering the chimney, was a great brick oven, big enough to bake all the bread needed by a large family for a week or ten days. The oven was heated by a brisk fire made of birch or maple or some very rapidly burning wood. When the coals were taken out, the bread was put in, and the oven was shut with two iron doors. The baking-day was commonly Saturday.

When the bread was taken out Saturday afternoon it was usual to put in a large pot of beans for the Sunday dinner. They were left there all night and the oven was opened in the morning and enough came out for breakfast, when there was put into the oven a pot of Indian pudding, which was left with the rest of the beans for the Sunday dinner.

The parlor fire was a very beautiful sight, with the big logs and the sparkling walnut or oak wood blazing up. Some of the housekeepers of that time had a good deal of skill in arranging the wood in a fireplace so as to make of it a beautiful piece of architecture. Lowell describes these old fires very well in his ballad, "The Courtin'":

A fireplace filled the room's one side With half a cord o'wood in— There warn't no stoves (till comfort died) To bake ye to a puddin'.

The wannut logs shot sparkles out Towards the pootiest, bless her! An' leetle flames danced all about The chiny on the dresser.

Agin' the chimbley crooknecks hung, An' in amongst 'em rusted The old queen's arm thet Gran'ther Young Fetched back from Concord busted.

We did not have fireplaces quite as large as this in my father's house, although they were common in the farmers' houses round about.

In the coldest weather the heat did not come out a great way from the hearth, and the whole family gathered close about the fire to keep warm. It was regarded as a great breach of good manners to go between any person and the fire. The fireplace was the centre of the household, and was regarded as the type and symbol of the home. The boys all understood the force of the line:

Strike for your altars and your fires!

I wonder if any of my readers nowadays would be stirred by an appeal to strike for his furnace or his air-tight stove.

Sunday was kept with Jewish strictness. The boys were not allowed to go out-of-doors except to church. They could not play at any game or talk about matters not pertaining to religion. They were not permitted to read any books except such as were "good for Sunday." There were very few religious story-books in those days, and what we had were of a dreary kind; so the boy's time hung heavy on his hands.

"Pilgrim's Progress," with its rude prints, was, however, a great resource. We conned it over and over again, and knew it by heart. An elder brother of mine who was very precocious was extremely fond of it, especially of the picture of the fight between Apollyon and Christian, where the fiend with his head covered with stiff, sharp bristles "straddled clear across the road," to stop Christian in his way. Old Dr. Lyman Beecher, who had his stiff gray hair cropped short all over his head, made a call at our house one afternoon. While he was waiting for my mother to come down, the little fellow came into the room and took a look up at the doctor, and then trotted round to the other side and looked up at him again. He said, "I think, sir, you look like Apollyon."

The doctor was infinitely amused at being compared to the personage of whom, in his own opinion and that of a good many other good people, he was then the most distinguished living antagonist.

The church was an old-fashioned wooden building, painted yellow, of Dutch architecture, with galleries on three sides, and on the fourth a pulpit with a great sounding-board over it, into which the minister got by quite a high flight of stairs. Just below the pulpit was the deacons' seat, where the four deacons sat in a row. The pews were old-fashioned square, high pews, reaching up almost to the top of the head of a boy ten years old when he was standing up.

The seats were without cushions and with hinges. When the people stood up for prayer the seats were turned up for greater convenience of standing, and when the prayer ended they came down all over the church with a slam, like a small cannonade.

One Sunday, in the middle of the sermon, the old minister, Doctor Ripley, stood up in the pulpit and said in a loud voice, "Simeon, come here. Take your hat and come here." Simeon was a small boy who lived in the doctor's family and sat in the gallery. We boys all supposed that Simeon had been playing in church, or had committed some terrible offence for which he was to be punished in sight of the whole congregation.

Simeon came down trembling and abashed, and the doctor told him to go home as fast as he could and get the Thanksgiving Proclamation. The doctor filled up the time as well he could with an enormously long prayer, until the boy got back. Simeon confessed to some of the boys that he had been engaged in some mischief just before he was called, and he was terribly afraid the doctor had caught him.

This old church with its tower, yellow spire, old clock and weathercock, seems to me as I look back on it to have been a very attractive piece of architecture. It was that church which suggested to Emerson the leading thought in one of his most famous poems, "The Problem."

In those days, when people were to be married the law required notice to be given of their intention by proclaiming it aloud in the church three Sundays in succession. So just before the service began, the old town clerk would get up and proclaim: "There is a marriage intended between Mr. John Brown of this town and Miss Sarah Smith of Sudbury," and there was great curiosity in the congregation to hear the announcement. The town clerk in my boyhood had been a wealthy old bachelor for whom the young ladies had set their caps in vain for two generations. One day he astonished the congregation by proclaiming: "There is a marriage intended between Dr. Abiel Keywood"—which was his own name—"and Miss Lucy P. Fay, both of Concord." That was before I can remember, as his boys were about my age.

Doctor Ripley, the minister in Concord, was an old man who had been settled there during the Revolutionary War and was over the parish sixty-two years. He was an excellent preacher and scholar, and his kindly despotism was submitted to by the whole town. His way of pronouncing would sound very queer now, though it was common then. I well remember his reading the lines of the hymn—

Let every critter jine To praise the eternal God.

Scattered about the church were the good gray heads of many survivors of the Revolution—the men who had been at the bridge on the 19th of April, and who made the first armed resistance to the British power. They were very striking and venerable figures, with their queues and knee-breeches and shoes with shining buckles. Men were more particular about their apparel in those days than we are now. They had great stateliness of behavior, and admitted of little familiarity.

They had heard John Buttrick's order to fire, which marked the moment when our country was born. The order was given to British subjects. It was obeyed by American citizens. Among them was old Master Blood, who saw a ball strike the water when the British fired their first volley. I heard many of the old men tell their stories of the Battle of Concord, and of the capture of Burgoyne.

I lay down on the grass one summer afternoon, when old Amos Baker of Lincoln, who was in the Lincoln Company on the 19th of April, told me the whole story. He was very indignant at the claim that the Acton men marched first to attack the British because the others hesitated. He said, "It was because they had bagnets [bayonets]. The rest of us hadn't no bagnets."

One day a few years later, when I was in college, I walked up from Cambridge to Concord, through Lexington, and had a chat with old Jonathan Harrington by the roadside. He told me he was on the Common when the British Regulars fired upon the Lexington men. He did not tell me then the story which he told afterward at the great celebration at Concord in 1850. He and Amos Baker were the only survivors who were there that day. He said he was a boy about fifteen years old on April 19, 1775. He was a fifer in the company. He had been up the greater part of the night helping get the stores out of the way of the British, who were expected, and went to bed about three o'clock, very tired and sleepy. His mother came and pounded with her fist on the door of his chamber, and said, "Git up, Jonathan! The Reg'lars are comin' and somethin' must be done!"

Governor Briggs repeated this anecdote in the old man's presence at the Concord celebration in 1850. Charles Storey, a noted wit, father of the eminent lawyer, Moorfield Storey, sent up to the chair this toast: "When Jonathan Harrington got up in the morning on April 19, 1775, a near relative and namesake of his got up about the same time: Brother Jonathan. But his mother didn't call him."

A very curious and amusing incident is said, and I have no doubt truly, to have happened at this celebration. It shows how carefully the great orator, Edward Everett, looked out for the striking effects in his speech. He turned in the midst of his speech to the seat where Amos Baker and Jonathan Harrington sat, and addressed them. At once they both stood up, and Mr. Everett said, with fine dramatic effect, "Sit, venerable friends. It is for us to stand in your presence."

After the proceedings were over, old Amos Baker was heard to say to somebody, "What do you suppose Squire Everett meant? He came to us before his speech and told us to stand up when he spoke to us, and when we stood up he told us to sit down."

So you will understand how few lives separate you from the time when our country was born, and the time when all our people were British subjects.

But to come back to our old meeting-house. The windows rattled in the winter, and the cold wind came in through the cracks. There was a stove which was rather a modern innovation; but it did little to temper the coldness of a day in midwinter. We used to carry to church a little foot-stove with a little tin pan in it, which we filled with coal from the stove in the meeting-house, and the ladies of the family would pass it round to each other to keep their toes from freezing; but the boys did not get much benefit from it.

They had good schools in Concord, and the boys generally were good scholars and read good books. So whenever they thought fit they could use as good language as anybody; but their speech with one another was in the racy, pithy Yankee dialect, which Lowell has made immortal in the "Biglow Papers." It was not always grammatical, but as well adapted for conveying wit and humor and shrewd sense as the Scotch of Burns.

The boys knew very well how to take the conceit or vanity out of their comrades. In the summer days all the boys of the village used to gather at a place on the river, known as Thayer's swimming-place, about half a mile from the town pump, which was the centre from which all distances were measured in those days. There was a little gravel beach where you could wade out a rod or two, and then for a rod or two the water was over the boy's head. It then became shallow again near the opposite bank. So it was a capital place to learn to swim.

After they came out, the boys would sit down on the bank and have a sort of boys' exchange, in which all matters of interest were talked over, and a great deal of good-natured chaff was exchanged. Any newcomer had to pass through an ordeal of this character, in which his temper and quality were thoroughly tried. I remember now an occasion which must have happened when I was not more than eight or ten years old, when a rather awkward-looking greenhorn had come down from New Hampshire and made his appearance at the swimming- place. The boys, one after another, tried him by putting mocking questions or attempting to humbug him with some large story. He received it all with patience and good nature until one remark seemed to sting him from his propriety. He turned with great dignity upon the offender, and said, "Was that you that spoke, or was it a punkin busted?" We all thought that it was well said, and took him into high favor.

I suppose the outdoor winter sports have not changed much since my childhood. The sluggish Concord River used to overflow its banks and cover the broad meadows for miles, where we found excellent skating, and where the water would be only a foot or two in depth. The boys could skate for ten miles to Billerica and ten miles back, hardly going over deep water, except at the bridges, the whole way.

Sleigh-riding was not then what it is now. There were a few large sleighs owned in the town which would hold thirty or forty persons, and once or twice in the winter the boys and girls would take a ride to some neighboring town when the sleighing was good.

The indoor games were marbles, checkers, backgammon, dominoes, hunt-the-slipper, blind-man's-buff, and in some houses, where they were not too strict, they played cards. High-low-jack, sometimes called all-fours or seven-up, everlasting and old maid were the chief games of cards. Most of these games have come down from a very early antiquity.

The summer outdoor games were mumble-the-peg, high-spy, snap- the-whip, a rather dangerous performance, in which a long row of boys, with the biggest boy at one end, and tapering down to the smallest at the other end, would run over a field or open space until suddenly the big boy would stop, turn half around, and stand still and hold fast with all his might. The result was that the boy next to him had to move a very little distance, but the little fellow at the end was compelled to describe a half-circle with great rapidity, and was sometimes hurled across the field, and brought up with a heavy fall. There were thread-the-needle, hunt-the-red-lion and football, played very much as it is now, except with less system and discipline, and various games of ball. These games of ball were much less scientific and difficult than the modern games. Chief were four-old-cat, three-old-cat, two-old-cat and base.

We had fewer studies at our school than now. The boy who did not go to college learned to read and write, perhaps an elementary history of the United States, and arithmetic, and occasionally made some little progress in algebra. On Saturdays we used to "speak pieces." Our favorites were some spirited lyric, like "Scots Wha Hae" or Pierpont's "Stand, the ground's your own, my braves," "The boy stood on the burning deck," and "Bernardo del Carpio." Sometimes, though not often, some comic piece was chosen, like Jack Downing's "Tax on Old Bachelors."

Those who fitted for college added Latin and Greek to these studies. The children were sent to school earlier than is the present fashion, and had long school hours and few vacations. There were four vacations in the year, of a week each, and three days at Thanksgiving time. Little account was made of Christmas. The fashion of Christmas presents was almost wholly unknown. The boys used to be allowed to go out of school to study in the warm summer days, and would find some place in a field, and sometimes up in the belfry of the little schoolhouse. I remember studying Caesar there with George Brooks, afterward judge, and reading with him an account of some battle where Caesar barely escaped being killed, on which Brooks's comment was "I wish to thunder he had been!"

I am afraid the boys did not respect the property of the owners of the neighboring apple orchards, as undoubtedly the better-trained boys of modern times do now. We understood the law to be that all apples that grew on the branches extending over the highway were public property, and I am afraid that when the owner was not about we were not very particular as to the boundary line. This seems to have been a trait of boy nature for generations. You know Sidney Smith's account of the habit of boys at his school to rob a neighboring orchard, until the farmer bought a large, savage bulldog for his protection. Some of the big boys told Sidney that if a boy would get down on his hands and knees and go backward toward the dog the dog would be frightened, and he could get the apples. He tried the experiment unsuccessfully, and with the result that concluded, as he says, that "it makes no difference to a bulldog which end of a boy he gets hold of, if he only gets a good hold."

The discipline of the schoolmaster in those days was pretty severe. For slight offences the boys were deprived of their recess or compelled to study for an hour after the school was dismissed. The chief weapon of torture was the ferule, to the efficacy of which I can testify from much personal knowledge. The master had in his desk, however, a cowhide for gross cases. I do not remember knowing how that felt from personal experience, but I remember very well seeing it applied occasionally to the big boys.

In the infant schools, which were kept by women, of course the discipline was not expected to be so severe. The schoolmistress in those days wore what was called a busk—a flat piece of lancewood, hornbeam, or some other like tough and elastic wood, thrust into a sort of pocket or sheath in her dress, which came up almost to the chin and came down below the waist. This was intended to preserve the straightness and grace of her figure. When the small boy misbehaved, the schoolma'am would unsheath this weapon, and for some time thereafter the culprit found sitting down exceedingly uncomfortable.

Sometimes the sole of the schoolmistress's slipper answered the same purpose, and sometimes a stick from some neighboring birch-tree. It all came to pretty much the same thing in the end. The schoolmistress knew well how to accomplish her purpose. There was a diversity of gifts but the same spirit.

We were put to school much earlier than children are now and were more advanced in our studies on the whole. I began to study Latin on my sixth birthday. When I was nine years old I was studying Greek, and had read several books of Virgil. We were not very thorough Latin scholars, even when we entered college, but could translate Virgil and Cicero and Caesar and easy Greek like Xenophon.

The boys occasionally formed military companies and played soldier, but these did not, so far as I remember, last very long. There was also a company of Indians, who dressed in long white shirts, with pieces of red flannel sewn on them. They had wooden spears. That was more successful, and lasted some time.

They were exceedingly fond of seeing the real soldiers. There were two full companies in Concord, the artillery and the light infantry. The artillery had two cannon captured from the British, which had been presented to the company by the legislature in honor of April 19, 1775. When these two companies paraded, they were followed by an admiring train of small boys all day long, if the boys could get out of school. I remember on one occasion there was a great rivalry between the companies, and one of them got the famous Brigade Band from Boston, and the other an equally famous band, called the Boston Brass Band, in which Edward Kendall, the great musician, was the player on the bugle. A very great day indeed was the muster-day, when sometimes an entire brigade would be called out for drill. These muster-days happened three or four times in my boyhood in Concord.

But the great day of all was what was called "Cornwallis," which was the anniversary of the capture of Cornwallis at Yorktown. There were organized companies in uniform representing the British army and an equally large number of volunteers, generally in old-fashioned dress, and with such muskets and other accoutrements as they could pick up, who represented the American army. There was a parade and a sham fight which ended as all such fights, whether sham or real, should end, in a victory for the Americans, and Cornwallis and his troops were paraded, captive and ignominious. I quite agree with Hosea Biglow when he says, "There is a fun to a Cornwallis, though; I aint agoin' to deny it."

The boys cared little for politics, though they used to profess the faith of their fathers; but every boy sometimes imagined himself a soldier, and his highest conception of glory was to "lick the British." I remember walking home from school with a squad of little fellows at the time Andrew Jackson issued his famous message, when he threatened war if the French did not pay us our debt. We discussed the situation with great gravity, and concluded that if the French beat us, we should have a king to rule over us.

Besides the two military companies, there was another called the "Old Shad." The law required every able-bodied man of military age to turn out for military training and inspection on the last Wednesday in May; they turned out just to save the penalty of the law, and used to dress in old clothes, and their awkward evolutions were the object of great scorn to the small boy of the time.

The streets of Concord were made lively by the stage-coaches and numerous teams. There were four taverns in the town, all well patronized, with numerous sleeping-rooms. Two of them had large halls for dancing. A great many balls were given, to which persons came from the neighboring towns.

There was an excellent fiddler named John Wesson, who continued to give the benefit of his talent to all parties, public and private, down to the time of the war, when he said he would not play a dancing tune till the boys came home. He died soon after, and I do not know whether his music was ever heard again. These taverns were crowded with guests. One principal route for stages and teams to New Hampshire, Vermont and Canada passed through Concord.

There were several lines of stages, one from Lowell to Framingham, and two at least from Boston. The number of passengers, which now are all carried by rail, was so large that extras were frequently necessary. The teams were very often more than the barns of the taverns in the town could accommodate, and on summer nights the wagons would extend for long distances along the village street with horses tied behind them.

The sound of the toddy stick was hardly interrupted in the barroom inside from morning till night. The temperance reform had not made great headway in my youthful days. It was not uncommon to see farmers, bearing names highly respected in the town, lying drunk by the roadside on a summer afternoon, or staggering along the streets. The unpainted farmhouses and barns had their broken windows stuffed with old hats or garments. I have heard Nathan Brooks, who delivered the first temperance lecture in the town, at the request of the selectmen, say that after it was over he and the selectmen and some of the principal citizens went over to the tavern, and each took a mug of flip.

There were great quantities of huckleberries in the pastures about Concord, and the sweet high blackberries abounded by the roadside. There were plenty of chestnuts in the woods, and the walnut, or pig-nut, also abounded; so that berrying and nutting were favorite pastimes.

When I was a small boy a party of us went down to Walden woods, afterward so famous as the residence of Henry Thoreau. There was an old fellow named Tommy Wyman, who lived in a hut near the pond, who did not like the idea of having the huckleberry- fields near him invaded by the boys. He told us it was not safe for us to go there. He said there was an Indian doctor in the woods who caught small boys and cut out their livers to make medicine. We were terribly frightened, and all went home in a hurry.

When we got near the town, we met old John Thoreau, with his son Henry, and I remember his amusement when I told him the story. He said, "If I meet him, I will run this key down his throat," producing a key from his pocket. We reported the occurrence at the village store, but were unable to excite any interest in the subject.

Thanksgiving was then, as it is and ought to be now, the great day of the year. All the children were at home. The ambition of the head of the house was to get the largest turkey that money could buy. No Thanksgiving dinner was quite complete unless there were a baby on hand belonging to some branch of the family, no bigger than the turkey. The preparation for Thanksgiving was very interesting to the small boy mind. A boiled or roasted turkey, a pair of chickens, chicken pie, wonderful cranberry sauce, a plum pudding, and all manner of apple pies, mince pies, squash pies, pumpkin pies, and nuts, raisins, figs and noble apples made part of the feast. I suppose Thanksgiving customs have changed less than most others, except in one particular. I do not believe there is a small boy's stomach in this generation that can hold a tenth part of what used to go into mine, not only on Thanksgiving day, but on the days before and after. The raisins were to be picked over, the nuts and citron got ready, when Thanksgiving was coming on, of all which we took abundant tolls. The cold and warmed-over dishes lasted through the rest of the week. I do not know what the Jewish festival or the old Roman banquets might have been, but they could not have equalled a New England Thanksgiving week in a house in the country.

The doctor in those days was a terror to the small boy. The horrible and nasty castor oil, ipecac and calomel, and the salts and senna, sulphur and molasses taken three mornings in succession and then missed three mornings, were worse than any sickness. Of the last I speak only from hearsay, not from personal knowledge. Then the cupping and bleeding were fearful things to go through or look upon. We had none of the sweet patent medicines that the children now cry for, and none of the smooth capsules or the pleasant comfits that turn medicine into confectionery nowadays.

The boys were not allowed in most families to read novels, even on week-days. My father had a great dislike of fiction of all sorts, and for a good while would not tolerate any novels in the house; but one winter day he went to Pepperell, in the northern part of the county, to try a case before a sheriff's jury. About the time the case got through there came up a sudden and violent snowstorm, which blocked up the road with deep drifts so that he could not get home for two or three days. He had to stay at a small country tavern, and the time hung very heavily on his hands.

He asked the landlord if he had any books. The only one he could find was a first volume of Scott's "Redgauntlet," which was just then being published in Boston by a bookseller named Parker, in what was called Parker's revised edition. Father read it with infinite delight. His eyes were opened to the excellence of Scott. He got home the next day at about noon, and immediately sent one of the children down to the circulating library to get the second volume. He subscribed to Parker's edition, and was a great lover of Scott ever after.

We were permitted, however, to read the "Tales of a Grandfather." I hope if any boy reads this book he will read the "Tales of a Grandfather," especially the parts which give the history of Scotland. It is a most interesting and noble story. I can remember now how the tears ran down my cheeks as I read Scott's description of finding the bones of Robert Bruce in the old abbey at Dunfermline:

"As the church would not hold half the numbers, the people were allowed to pass through it one after another, that each one, the poorest as well as the richest, might see all that remained of the great king, Robert Bruce. Many people shed tears; for there was the wasted skull which once was the head, that thought so wisely and boldly for his country's deliverance; and there was the dry bone which had once been the sturdy arm that killed Sir Henry de Bohun, between the two armies, at a single blow on the evening before the Battle of Bannockburn."

I account it one of the chief blessings of my life that my boyhood was spent in the pure, noble and simple society of the people of Concord. I am afraid I did not do it much credit then. Old Dr. Bartlett, one of the worthiest and kindliest of men, but who always uttered what was in his heart, said after my two oldest brothers and I had grown up, that Samuel Hoar's boys used to be the three biggest rascals in Concord, but they all seemed to have turned out pretty well. I have so far kept this statement strictly from the knowledge of the Democratic papers. But I suppose it is too late to do any harm now.

CHAPTER V FAMOUS CONCORD MEN

There were in Concord in my boyhood three writers who afterward became very famous indeed—Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau. Mr. Lowell said that these three names shine among all others in American literature as the three blazing stars in the belt of Orion shine in the sky.

The town is represented in the beautiful building of the Congressional Library at Washington by busts of Emerson and Hawthorne on the outside front of the building; by Emerson's name on the mosaic ceiling in the entrance pavilion, and by three sentences from his writings inscribed on the walls. There are two out of eight such busts. It is also represented by two figures, a symbolic Statue of History, and a bronze Statue of Herodotus, both by Daniel Chester French, the sculptor, a Concord man.

Emerson came to live in Concord in the summer of 1835. Although he was born in Boston and went to school there, he belonged to the town by virtue of his descent from a race of Concord ministers who held the pulpit, with very brief intervals, from 1635 to 1841. But I do not think his influence upon the town was very great for the first fifteen or twenty years of his life there. Indeed, I think he would have said that the town had more influence upon him than he had upon it. The Concord people, like the general public, were slow in coming to know his great genius. He was highly respected always. But the people were at first puzzled by him. His life was somewhat secluded. He spent his days in study and in solitary walks. Until Mrs. Ripley came to the old manse, about 1846, Emerson had, I think, no intimate friend outside of his own household, except my sister Elizabeth, who had been betrothed to his brother Charles, and was as a sister to Emerson until her death in 1878. A good many allusions to her will be found in his life and in his letters to Carlyle. After she died and shortly before his own death he appeared at my brother's house one day with a manuscript which he had handed to the Judge. He had gone over his diary for a great many years and extracted and copied everything in it which related to her.

He used to read lectures to the Lyceum, and in reading his books now I find a great many passages which I remember to have heard him read in my youthful days. In one of his lectures upon Plato, he said that he turned everything to the use of his philosophy, that "wife, children and friends were all ground into paint"—alluding to Washington Allston's story of the Paint King who married a lovely maiden that he might make paint of the beautiful color of her cheeks.

A worthy farmer's wife in the audience took this literally, and left the room in high dudgeon. She said she thought Waldo Emerson might be in better business than holding up to the people of Concord the example of a wicked man who ground his wife and children into paint.

In Emerson's later days he was undoubtedly a powerful educational influence in the town. He was a man of much public spirit. In his philosophy his "soul was like a star and dwelt apart."

But he had a heart full of human affections. He loved the town. He loved his country. He loved his family. He loved his neighbors and friends. He could be stirred deeply on fit occasions by righteous indignation. Some of the men who frequented the tavern, posted in the barroom a scurrilous libel upon old Dr. Bartlett, the venerable physician, who had incurred their hostility by his zeal in enforcing the prohibitory laws. Emerson heard of it and repaired to the spot and tore down the offensive paper with his own hand. After Wendell Phillips made an equally scurrilous attack on Judge Hoar, Emerson refused to take his hand.

In his lament for his beautiful boy he uttered the voice of parental sorrow in immortal accents. In the poems, "In Memoriam," and in "The Dirge," he records how lonely the lovely Concord Valley is to him since his brothers are gone as he wanders there in the long sunny afternoon:

Harken to you pine warbler, Singing aloft in the tree! Hearest thou, O, traveller, What he singeth to me?

Not unless God made sharp thine ear With sorrow such as mine, Out of that delicate lay couldst thou Its heavy tale divine.

But I think that the life of his younger brother Charles, though he died so early, was felt as an even greater force in Concord than that of Waldo.

I hope I may be pardoned if I put on record here a slight and imperfect tribute to the memory of Charles Emerson, who was betrothed to my eldest sister. It is nearly seventy years ago. Yet the sweet and tender romance is still fresh in my heart. He was a descendant of a race of Concord clergymen, including Peter Bulkeley, the founder of the town. He was born in Boston, but spent much of his youth in Concord in the household of Dr. Ripley, who was the second husband of the grandmother of the Emersons. He studied law partly at Cambridge Law School, partly in Daniel Webster's office in Boston, and afterward with my father in Concord. When my father took his seat in Congress, in 1835, Emerson succeeded to his office, and if he had lived would have succeeded to his practice. Waldo Emerson had left it on record that he was led to choose Concord as a dwelling-place to be near his brother. Waldo's house had been enlarged to make room for Charles and his bride under the same roof. The house was ready and the wedding near at hand when, in riding from Boston to Concord on top of the stage, Charles took a violent cold, which was followed by pleurisy and death. He was of a very sociable nature, knew all the town people, lectured before the Lyceum, had a class in the Sunday-school and used to speak in the Lyceum debates. He had a very pleasant wit. He was on the committee for the celebration of the settlement of the town in 1835, at the end of two hundred years, and about the same time was on a committee to attend the celebration at Acton, where the people claimed for themselves all the glory of the Concord Fight. He had thought it likely the Acton people would ask him to speak. But they did not. As he was riding back in the chaise, he said if they had asked him to speak, he had it in mind to give as a toast, "The blessed Memory of the Pilgrim Fathers, who first landed at Acton."

He was especially fond of boys, and they of him. When he died, every schoolboy thought he had lost a friend. One had a knife and another a book or a picture which he prized, and another a pair of skates which Charles Emerson had given him. It may be a fond exaggeration, but I think he was the most brilliant intellect ever born in Massachusetts.

Mr. Webster, who was consulted as to where Emerson should settle, said, "Settle! Let him settle anywhere. Let him settle in the midst of the back woods of Maine, the clients will throng after him." Mr. Everett delivered an eloquent eulogy after his death, at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Harvard.

Dr. Holmes' exquisite tribute in his Phi Beta poems is well known:

Thou calm, chaste scholar! I can see thee now, The first young laurels on they pallid brow, O'er thy slight figure floating lightly down In graceful folds the academic gown, On thy curled lip the classic lines that taught How nice the mind that sculptured them with thought, And triumph glistening in the clear blue eye, Too bright to live,—but Oh! too fair to die.

Dr. Holmes also says in his last tribute to Waldo:

"Of Charles Chauncey, the youngest brother, I knew something in my college days. A beautiful, high-souled, pure, exquisitely delicate nature in a slight but finely wrought mortal frame, he was for me the very ideal of an embodied celestial intelligence. I may venture to mention a trivial circumstance, because it points to the character of his favorite reading, which was likely to be guided by the same tastes as his brother's, and may have been specially directed by him. Coming into my room one day, he took up a copy of Hazlitt's British Poets. He opened it to the poem of Andrew Marvell's, entitled, 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn,' which he read to me with delight irradiating his expressive features. The lines remained with me, or many of them, from that hour,—

Had it lived long, it would have been Lilies without, roses within.

"I felt as many have felt after being with his brother, Ralph Waldo, that I had entertained an angel visitant. The fawn of Marvell's imagination survives in my memory as the fitting image to recall this beautiful youth; a soul glowing like the rose of morning with enthusiasm, a character white as the lilies in its purity."

The late Samuel May, who was in the class after Emerson's at Harvard, told me that the impression his character and person made upon the students of his time was so great that when he passed through the college yard, everybody turned to look after him, as in later days men looked after Webster when he passed down State Street.

The Rev. Joseph H. Cross, now (1903) still living, the oldest graduate of Harvard, was his classmate. I received this letter from him a few years ago:

66 BRADFORD ST., LAWRENCE, January 8, 1897. HON. G. F. HOAR,

Dear Sir:

Yours of 5th inst. is before me; and I am glad to remember my classmate Emerson and answer your inquiries. I knew that he studied law in your Honored Father's office, and was betrothed to your eldest sister.

Your first inquiry is "as to his looks." He was above medium height, well proportioned and straight as an arrow, brown hair and clear blue eyes, with fair complexion and handsome features. "His scholarship and talents," both of the highest order. The class regarded him as the first and best scholar, dignified and refined in manners, courteous and amiable in spirit. He had great influence in his own class, and was much esteemed and beloved by all. I think the impression he made upon all who knew him was that of a classical scholar and a perfect gentleman.

Dr. Channing said when he died that all New England mourned his loss.

Although Charles was seven years the younger, his brother Waldo speaks of him as his own master and teacher. The following letter was written by Waldo to his aunt Mary just after Charles's death. A part of it is printed in Cabot's Biography. Waldo and my sister, Elizabeth, heard of the extremity of his danger, and were on their way to see him, but arrived too late to find him alive.

"12 May.

"You have already heard that E. and I arrived too late to see Charles. He died on Monday afternoon, immediately after returning from a ride with Mother. He got out of the coach alone, walked up the steps and into the house without assistance, then sat down upon the stairs, fainted and never recovered. Yesterday afternoon we attended his funeral, and that is the end on this side Heaven, of his extraordinary promise, the union of such shining gifts,—grace and genius, and sense and virtue. What a loss is this to us all—to Elizabeth and Mother and you and me. In him I have lost all my society. I sought no other and formed my habits to live with him. I deferred to him on so many questions and trusted him more than myself, that I feel as if I had lost the best part of myself. In him were the foundations of so solid a confidence and friendship that all the years of life leaned upon him. His genius too was a fountain inexhaustible of thoughts and kept me ever curious and expectant. Nothing was too great, nothing too beautiful for his grasp or his expression, and as brilliant as his power of illustration was, he stuck like a mathematician to his truth and never added a syllable for display. I cannot tell you how much I have valued his conversation for these last two or three years, and he has never stopped growing, but has ripened from month to month. Indeed, the weight of his thoughts and the fresh and various forms in which he constantly clothed them has made Shakespeare more conceivable to me, as Shakespeare was almost the only genius whom he wholly loved. His taste was unerring. What he called good was good, but so severe was it that very few works and very few men could satisfy him, and this because his standard was a pure ideal beauty and he never forgot himself so far as to accept any lower actual one in lieu of it. But I must not begin yet to enumerate his perfections. I shall not know where to stop, and what would be bare truth to me would sound on paper like the fondest exaggeration.

"I mourn for the Commonwealth, which has lost before it yet had learned his name the promise of his eloquence and rare public gifts. He blessed himself that he had been bred from infancy as it were in the public eye, and he looked forward to the debates in the Senate on great political questions as to his fit and native element. And with reason, for in extempore debate his speech was music, and the precision, the flow and the elegance of his discourse equally excellent. Familiar as I was with his powers, when a year ago I first heard him take part in a debate, he surprised me with his success. He spoke so well that he was impatient of writing as not being a fit medium for him. I never shall hear such speaking as his, for his memory was a garden of immortal flowers, and all his reading came up to him as he talked, to clear, elevate and decorate the subject of his present thought. But I shall never have done describing, as I see well I shall never cease grieving as long as I am on the earth that he has left it. It seems no longer worth living in, if whatever delights us in it departs. He has quitted forever the apparent, the partial. He has gone to make acquaintance with the real, the good, the divine, and to find mates and co-operators such as we could not offer him."

Charles Emerson entered with zeal and sympathy into the daily life of the people of Concord. He delivered a few lectures, which were quite celebrated. Some of his manuscripts are in existence, and there is a boyish essay or two in the Harvard Magazine, one on Conversation and one on Friendship, which show a singular charm and simplicity of style. He wrote the epitaph on the tomb of Professor Ashmun at Mount Auburn, and a tribute to his friend, James Jackson, Jr., which is preserved in Jackson's memoir by his father.

Miss Martineau, in a chapter of her autobiography written in 1836, describes the feeling in Boston in regard to the opposition to slavery, which seems now incredible even to those who remember it. She says:

"The Emersons, for the adored Charles Emerson was living then, were not men to join an association for any object . . . . But at the time of the hubbub against me in Boston, Charles Emerson stood alone of a large company in defence of free thought and speech, and declared that he had rather see Boston in ashes than that I or anybody should be debarred in any way from perfectly free speech."

Robert C. Winthrop, who was Charles Emerson's intimate friend in boyhood, wrote for the Advertizer a beautiful obituary notice. He says: "Emerson was eminently a man of genius. We know not that in his riper years he ever wrote a line of poetry, but no one could have listened to him, either in private or public without feeling that he had a poet's power; while his prose composition was of so pure and finished a style as to show plainly that close perusal of the English Classics in which he so much delighted . . . . One opinion which Mr. Emerson had early formed, and which had he been spared to mature life might have contributed much to his eminence may, in the sad event which has occurred, have contracted the circle of his fame . . . . He had formed in his own mind a standard of education far beyond that which can be completed, even by the most faithful application, within the ordinary rounds of school and college—an education in which every man must be mainly his own master. In the work of this enlarged self- education he was engaged, and, until it was finished, he shrunk from the appearance of attempting to instruct others. He had in him all the elements which would have insured the success of early efforts at display—a fluent speech, a fine elocution, quick conception, a brilliant fancy. But his ambition, . . . while it aspired to a lofty eminence, was content to see that eminence still in the distance." Mr. Winthrop adds, "Principle, unyielding and uncompromising principle, was the very breath of his soul, and pervaded and animated his whole intellectual system . . . . He openly professed what he believed, and he acted up to his professions. He not only held conscience the guide of his life, but he took care to school and discipline that conscience so that its dictates should always conform to truth, to duty, to the laws of God. He was an honorable, high-minded, virtuous man—a sincere and devout Christian . . . . He has fallen at the very gate of an honorable and eminent career, and a thousand hopes are buried in his grave."

A few years before Mr. Winthrop died I met him in Cambridge, at the Peabody Museum, of which we were both trustees. The trustees were gathered in their room waiting for the meeting to be called to order. Mr. Winthrop was talking about his college days. I asked him how it happened that there were so many distinguished persons, in various departments of excellence, who were graduated from Harvard about his time, in his class and in the few classes following and preceding. I said that sometimes there would be several orators, or eminent men of science, or eminent classical scholars, or eminent teachers, graduated about the same time, and their excellence would be attributed to some one instructor; but that in his time there seemed to be a crop of great men in all departments of life—in natural history, in the pulpit, the bar, in oratory, in literature, and in public life. Mr. Winthrop rose to his feet from this chair and brought his hand down with great emphasis on the table as he answered: "It was the influence of Charles Emerson, Sir."

Charles Emerson delivered just before his death a very beautiful and impressive lecture on Socrates. It was long remembered by the people of Concord. It is said that they who heard it never forgot his beautiful figure and glowing countenance as he ended a passage of great eloquence at the close of the lecture with the words,

"God for thee has done His part. Do thine."

Mr. Hawthorne had published some short stories which had already made his name quite celebrated, but his great fame was still to be gained. He was poor and had a good deal of difficulty in gaining a decent living for himself and his young wife. I will not undertake to repeat the story of his life which Hawthorne has told so beautifully in his "Mosses from an Old Manse." I knew Mrs. Hawthorne very well indeed. She was a great friend of my oldest sister and used to visit my father's house when I was a boy, before she was married. It was owing to that circumstance that the Hawthornes came to live in Concord. She was quite fond of me. I used to get strawberries and wild flowers for her, and she did me great honor to draw my portrait, which now, fortunately or unfortunately, is lost. I went up to the house while they were absent on their wedding journey when I was a boy of fourteen or fifteen to help put things in order for the reception of the young couple.

The furniture was very cheap; a good deal of it was made of common maple. But Mrs. Hawthorne, who was an artist, had decorated it by drawings and paintings on the backs of the chairs and on the bureaus and bedsteads. On the headboard of her bed was a beautiful copy, painted by herself, of Guido's Aurora, with its exquisite light figures and horses and youths and maidens flying through the air.

I never knew Hawthorne except as a stately figure, whom I saw sometimes in Concord streets and sometimes in his own home. He rarely, if ever, opened his lips in my hearing. He was always very silent, hardly spoke in the presence of any visitor with whom he was not very intimate. So far as I know he never visited at the houses of his neighbors and never went to town-meeting. The latter was a deadly sin in the eyes of his democratic neighbors. Mr. Emerson induced him, one evening, to be one of a small company at his house. But Hawthorne kept silent and at last went to the window and looked out at the stars. One of the ladies said to the person next her: "How well he rides his horses of the night." He was very fond of long walks, and of rowing on the river with Thoreau and Ellery Channing.

The Old Manse was built in 1759 by the Rev. Daniel Bliss for his daughter Phoebe on her marriage to the Rev. William Emerson. She was grandmother of Waldo Emerson. Her second husband was the Rev. Dr. Ripley.

I knew Henry Thoreau very intimately. I went to school with him when I was a little boy and he was a big one. Afterward I was a scholar in his school.

He was very fond of small boys, and used to take them out with him in his boat, and make bows and arrows for them, and take part in their games. He liked also to get a number of the little chaps of a Saturday afternoon and take them out in his boat, or for a long walk in the woods.

He knew the best places to find huckleberries and blackberries and chestnuts and lilies and cardinal and other rare flowers. We used to call him Trainer Thoreau, because the boys called the soldiers the "trainers," and he had a long, measured stride and an erect carriage which made him seem something like a soldier, although he was short and rather ungainly in figure. He had a curved nose which reminded one a little of the beak of a parrot.

His real name was David Henry Thoreau, although he changed the order of his first two names afterward. He was a great finder of Indian arrow-heads, spear-heads, pestles, and other stone implements which the Indians had left behind them, of which there was great abundance in the Concord fields and meadows.

He knew the rare forest birds and all the ways of birds and wild animals. Naturalists commonly know birds and beasts and wild flowers as a surgeon who has dissected the human body, or perhaps sometimes a painter who has made pictures of them knows men and women. But he knew birds and beasts as one boy knows another—all their delightful little habits and fashions. He had the most wonderful good fortune. We used to say that if anything happened in the deep woods which only came about once in a hundred years, Henry Thoreau would be sure to be on the spot at the time and know the whole story.

It seemed that Nature could not raise A plant in any secret place, In quaking bog or snowy hill, Beneath the grass that shades the rill, Under the snow, between the rocks, In damp fields known to bird and fox, But he would come in the very hour It opened in its virgin bower, As if a sunbeam showed the place, And tell its long-descended race. It seemed as if the breezes brought him; It seemed as if the sparrows taught him; As if by secret sight he knew Where, in the far fields, the orchis grew. Many haps fall in the field Seldom seen by wishful eyes, But all her shows did Nature yield, To please and win this pilgrim wise. He saw the partridge drum in the woods; He heard the woodcock's evening hymn; He found the tawny thrushes' broods; And the shy hawk did wait for him; What others did at distance hear, And guessed within the thicket's gloom, Was shown to this philosopher, And at his bidding seemed to come.

These lines fit Henry Thoreau exactly. Most people think Emerson had him in mind when he wrote them. But as a matter of fact, they were written before he knew Henry Thoreau.

I wonder how many know the woodcock's evening hymn. I have known many sportsmen and naturalists who never heard it or heard of it. When the female is on her nest the male woodcock flies straight up into the sky, folds his wings and falls down through the air, coming down within a foot or two of the nest from which he ascended, pouring out a beautiful song, which he never sings at any other time. He is said to be one of the best and sweetest of our song birds.

It is a singular fact that Emerson did not know Henry Thoreau until after Thoreau had been some years out of college. Henry walked to Boston, eighteen miles, to hear one of Emerson's lectures, and walked home again in the night after the lecture was over. Emerson heard of it, and invited him to come to his house and hear the lectures read there, which he did. People used to say that Thoreau imitated Emerson, and Lowell has made this charge in his satire, "A Fable for Critics";

There comes ——, for instance; to see him's rare sport, Tread in Emerson's tracks with legs painfully short.

I think there is nothing in it. Thoreau's style is certainly fresh and original. His tastes and thoughts are his own. His peculiarities of bearing and behavior came to him naturally from his ancestors of the isle of Guernsey.

I retained his friendship to his death. I have taken many a long walk with him. I used to go down to see him in the winter days in my vacations in his hut near Walden. He was capital company. He was a capital guide in the wood. He liked to take out the boys in his boat. He was fond of discoursing. I do not think he was vain. But he liked to do his thinking out loud, and expected that you should be an auditor rather than a companion.

I have heard Thoreau say in private a good many things which afterward appeared in his writings. One day when we were walking, he leaned his back against a rail fence and discoursed of the shortness of the time since the date fixed for the creation, measured by human lives. "Why," he said, "sixty old women like Nabby Kettle" (a very old woman in Concord), "taking hold of hands, would span the whole of it." He repeats this in one of his books, adding, "They would be but a small tea-party, but their gossip would make universal history."

Another man who was famous as a writer went to school and afterward tended store in Concord in my childhood. This was George H. Derby, better known as John Phoenix. He was also very fond of small boys. I remember his making me what I thought a wonderful and beautiful work of art, by taking a sheet of stiff paper of what was called elephant foolscap, and folding it into a very small square, and then with a penknife cutting out small figures of birds and beasts. When the sheet was opened again these were repeated all over the sheet, and made it appear like a piece of handsome lace.

He did not get along very well with his employer, who was a snug and avaricious person. He would go to Boston once a week to make his purchases, leaving Derby in charge of the store. Derby would lie down at full length on the counter, get a novel, and was then very unwilling to be disturbed to wait on customers. If a little girl came in with a tin kettle to get some molasses, he would say the molasses was all out, and they would have some more next week. So the employer found that some of his customers were a good deal annoyed.

Another rather famous writer who lived in Concord in my time was Mr. A. Bronson Alcott. He used to talk to the children in the Sunday-school, and occasionally would gather them together in the evening for a long discourse. I am ashamed to say that we thought Mr. Alcott rather stupid. He did not make any converts to his theories among the boys.

He once told us that it was wicked to eat animal food; that the animal had the same right to his life that we had to ours, and we had no right to destroy the lives of any of God's creatures for our own purposes. He lived only on vegetable food, as he told us. But he had on at the time a very comfortable pair of calfskin boots, and the boys could not reconcile his notion that it was wicked to kill animals to eat, with killing animals that he might wear their hides. When such inconsistencies were pointed out to him he gave a look of mild rebuke at the audacious offender, and went on with his discourse as if nothing had happened.

The people who do not think very much of Alcott ought to speak with a god deal of modesty when they remember how highly Emerson valued him, and how sure was Emerson's judgment; but certainly nobody will attribute to Alcott much of the logical faculty. Emerson told me once:

"I got together some people a little while ago to meet Alcott and hear him converse. I wanted them to know what a rare fellow he was. But we did not get along very well. Poor Alcott had a hard time. Theodore Parker came all stuck full of knives. He wound himself round Alcott like an anaconda; you could hear poor Alcott's bones crunch."

Margaret Fuller used to visit Concord a good deal, and at one time boarded in the village for several months.

She was very peculiar in her ways, and made people whom she did not like feel very uncomfortable in her presence. She was not generally popular, although the persons who knew her best valued her genius highly. But old Doctor Bartlett, a very excellent and kind old doctor, though rather gruff in manner, could not abide her.

About midnight one very dark, stormy night the doctor was called out of bed by a sharp knocking at the door. He got up and put his head out of the window, and said, "Who's there? What do you want?" He was answered by a voice in the darkness below, "Doctor, how much camphire can anybody take by mistake without its killing them?" To which the reply was, "Who's taken it?" And the answer was "Margaret Fuller." The doctor answered in great wrath, as he slammed down the window, and returned to bed: "A peck."

William Ellery Channing, the poet, was a constant visitor of my sister, and later of my brother Edward. He was a moody and solitary person, except in the company of a few close friends who testified to the charming and delightful quality of his companionship. I suppose his poems will outlast a great many greater reputations. But they will always find very few readers in any generation.

Channing visited my elder sister almost every day or evening for a good while, but rarely remained more than two or three minutes if he found anybody else in the room.

George William Curtis, afterward the famous orator, and his brother, Burrill, occupied for a year or two a small farmhouse or hut, with one or two rooms in it, in Concord, on the Lincoln road. They had been at Brook Farm and came to Concord, I suppose attracted by Emerson. They came to my father's house during their stay there every afternoon, and their call was as much a regular incident of the day as any stated meal. Each of them was a boy of a very pleasant and delightful nature. I think if George Curtis had dwelt almost anywhere but in New York city, he would have been a very powerful influence in the public life of his generation. But he did not find any congenial associates in the men in New York who had any capacity to effect much good. His pure and lofty counsel fell unheeded upon the ears of his near neighbors, and the people of Massachusetts did not listen very patiently to lectures on political purity or reform in civil service from New York city.

I never maintained any considerable intimacy with Curtis, although I have a few letters from him, expressing his regard for some of my kindred or his interest and sympathy in something I had said or done. These I value exceedingly. One of the very last articles he wrote for Harper's Weekly, written just before his death, contains a far too kind estimate of my public service.

The Concord quality has come down with its people from the first settlement. The town was founded by Peter Bulkeley. He was a clergyman at Odell in Bedfordshire, where the church over which he was settled is still standing. He was a gentleman of good family and of a considerable estate which he spent for the benefit of the people whom he led into the wilderness. He encountered the hostility of Laud and, to use the phrase of that time, was "silenced for non-conformity." With Major Simon Willard, he made a bargain with the Indians, just to both parties, and with which both parties were perfectly satisfied, which rendered the name of Concord so appropriate, although in fact the name was given to the settlement before the company left Boston. That pulpit was occupied by Bulkeley and his descendants either by blood or marriage, from 1635 to 1696; from 1738 to 1841; and from 1882 to 1893.

I was able some forty years ago to settle in Concord a matter which had puzzled English historians, as to the legitimacy of the famous statesman and Chief Justice, Oliver St. John. Lord Campbell, in his "Lives of the Chief Justices," says: "It is a curious circumstance that there should be a dispute about the parentage of such a distinguished individual, who flourished so recently. Lord Clarendon, who knew him intimately from his youth, who practised with him in the Court of King's Bench, who sat in the House of Commons with him, and who was both associated with him and opposed to him in party strife, repeatedly represents him as illegitimate; and states that he was 'a natural son of the house of Bolingbroke.' Lord Bacon's account of his origin is equivocal—calling him 'a gentleman as it seems of an ancient house and name.' By genealogists and heralds a legitimate pedigree is assigned to him, deducing his descent in the right male line from William St. John, who came in with the Conqueror; but some of them describe him as the son of Sir John St. John, of Lydiard Tregose in Wiltshire, and others as the son of Oliver St. John of Cagshoe in Bedfordshire, and they differ equally respecting his mother. Lord Clarendon could hardly be mistaken on such a point, and I cannot help suspecting that the contrary assertions proceed from a desire to remove the bar sinister from the shield of a Chief Justice."

Lord Campbell has had diligent search made in the archives of Oxford and Lincoln's Inn, but does not find anything to change his opinion.

Fortunately we are able to settle the question about which Lord Campbell and Lord Bacon and Lord Clarendon were misled, in Old Concord. Peter Bulkeley was the uncle of Oliver St. John. He speaks of him in his will, and leaves him his Bible. Bulkeley's Gospel-Covenant, a book the substance of which was originally preached to his congregation, is dedicated to Oliver St. John. In the Epistle Dedicatory, he speaks of the pious and godly lives of St. John's parents, and alludes to the dying words of St. John's father as something which he and St. John had heard, but which was not known to other men. "I speak a mystery to others but not unto your Lordship."

So it is quite clear that St. John could not have been born out of wedlock, and the son of a man who had seduced the sister of this eminent and pious clergyman.

In Noble's "Memoirs of the Cromwell Family," published about seventy-five years after the death of St. John, he is said to be the son of Oliver St. John of Cagshoe in Bedfordshire.

When the "Lives of the Chief Justices" was first published, I wrote to Lord Campbell, telling him these facts, and received the following letter in reply:

LONDON, July 9th, 1861.

Sir

I thank you very sincerely for your interesting letter of December 13th, respecting Lord Chief Justice St. John. I think you establish his legitimacy quite satisfactorily and in any future edition of my Lives of the Chief Justices I shall certainly avail myself of your researches.

I have the honor to be Sir Your obliged and obedient Servant CAMPBELL.

The Honorable Geo. F. Hoar.

Something of Bulkeley's character may be gathered from this extract from the Gospel-Covenant, which Mr. Emerson, who was his descendant, loved to quote. Think of these words, uttered to his little congregation in the wilderness; the only company of white men in the Western Hemisphere who dwelt away from tide-water:

"And for ourselves, the people of New England, wee should in a speciall manner, labour to shine forth in holinesse above other people; we have that plenty and abundance of ordinances and meanes of grace as few people enjoy the like; wee are as a City set upon a hill, in the open view of all the earth, the eyes of the world are upon us, because wee professe ourselves to be a people in Covenant with God, and therefore not only the Lord our God, with whom we have made Covenant, but heaven and earth, Angels and men, that are witnesses of our profession, will cry shame upon us, if we walk contrary to the Covenant which we have professed to walk in; if we open the mouthes of men against our profession, by reason of the scandalousnesse of our lives, wee (of all men) shall have the greater sinne.

"To conclude, let us study so to walk, that this may be our excellency and dignity among the Nations of the world, among which we live; That they may be constrained to say of us, onely this people is wise, an holy and blessed people: that all that see us, may see and know that the name of the Lord is called upon us: and that we are the seed which the Lord hath blessed. Deut. 28. 10 Esay. 61. 9. There is no people but will strive to excell in something: what can we excell in if not in holinesse? If we look to number, we are the fewest; If to strength, we are the weakest; If to wealth and riches, we are the poorest of all the people of God throughout the whole world, we cannot excell (nor so much as equall) other people in these things; and if we come short in grace and holiness too, we are the most despicable people under heaven; our worldy dignitie is gone, if we lose the glory of grace too, then is the glory wholly departed from our Israel, and we are become vile; strive we therefore herein to excell, and suffer not this crown to be taken away from us: Be we a holy people, so shall we be honorable before God and precious in the eyes of his Saints."

To these eminent Concord authors should be added the name of William S. Robinson. He was one of the brightest and wittiest men of his time. He very seldom had praise for anybody, although for a few of his old Anti-Slavery friends he had a huge liking. When I was a little boy he was in a newspaper office in Concord, where he got most of his education. Afterward he was associated with William Schouler in editing the Lowell Courier, a Whig paper. When Schouler became editor of the Atlas, Robinson succeeded to the paper. But when the Free Soil movement came in, he would not flinch or abate a jot in his radical Anti-Slavery principles, which were not very agreeable to the proprietors of the cotton mills in Lowell, who depended both for their material and their market largely upon the South. Sumner described their alliance with their Southern customers as an alliance between the Lords of the Loom and the Lords of the Lash. So Robinson was compelled to give up his paper, in doing which he voluntarily embraced poverty instead of a certain and lucrative employment. He started an Anti-Slavery weekly paper in Lowell known as the Lowell American. That afforded him a bare and difficult living for a few years. After the Anti-Slavery people got into power he was made Clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Then he began to write his famous letters to the Springfield Republican, which he signed Warrington. They were full of wit and wisdom and displayed great knowledge of the best English literature. He made many enemies and finally, by a concert among them, was turned out of office. He lost his health not long after, and died prematurely.

He was quite unsparing in his attacks on anybody who offended him, or against whom he took a dislike; and he seemed to dislike everybody whom he did not know. It was said of him that, like the rain of Heaven, he "fell alike on the just and on the unjust." He attacked some of the most venerable and worthy citizens of the Commonwealth without any apparent reason. He used to call Chief Justice Chapman, one of the worthiest and kindest of men, Chief Justice Wheelgrease. He had a controversy in his paper of long standing with a man named Piper, a pompous and self-important little personage, who edited the Fitchburg Reveille. That was a Whig paper which circulated in the country towns where Robinson's paper was chiefly taken. He made poor Piper's life unhappy. One of the issues of his paper contained a life of Piper. It begun by saying that Piper began life as the driver of a fish-cart in Marblehead, and that he was discharged by his employer on account of the diffuseness of his style. He quoted with great effect on Otis P. Lord the toast given by the Court Jester of Archbishop Laud's time: "Great Laud be to God, and Little Lord to the Devil."

When he was clerk of the House of Representatives there was a story in the newspapers that he was preparing a treatise on Parliamentary law. He published a letter denying the statement. But he added, that if he did write such a treatise, he should sum it up in one sentence: "Never have an ass in the chair."

I was associated with him one day on the Committee on Resolutions of the Republican State Convention, held in Worcester. The Committee went over to my office to consult. While we were talking together Robinson broke out with his accustomed objurgations levelled at several very worthy and excellent men. I said: "William, it is fortunate that you did not live in the Revolutionary time. How you would have hated General Washington." He replied, with a smile that indicated the gratification he would have had if he could have got at him: "He was an old humbug, wasn't he?"

But Robinson was always on the righteous side of any question involving righteousness. He was kind, generous, absolutely disinterested, and a great and beneficent power in the Commonwealth.

CHAPTER VI FARM AND SCHOOL

I spent my life in Concord until I entered college except one year when I lived on a farm in Lincoln. There I had an opportunity to see at its best the character of the New England farmer, a character which has impressed itself so strongly and so beneficently on our history. Deacon James Farrar, for whom I worked, was, I believe, the fifth in descent from George Farrar, one of the founders of the town of Lincoln. All these generations dwelt on the same farm and under the same roof. An ancient forest came to a point not far from the house. That, with a large river meadow and some fertile upland fields, made up the farm. In every generation one or more of the family had gone to college and had become eminent in professional life, while one of them had stayed at home and carried on the farm. An uncle of the Deacon with whom I lived was Timothy Farrar of New Ipswich, an eminent judge who died considerably more than a hundred years old, and who was the oldest graduate of Harvard. Deacon James's own brother was Professor John Farrar of Harvard, a famous mathematician in his day, thought by his pupils to be the most eloquent man of his time, although Webster and Everett and Channing were his cotemporaries. It was a healthy and simple life of plain living and high thinking. But I think I got more good out of it in learning how the best intelligence of the State of Massachusetts was likely to judge of the questions of morals and duty than I got afterward from my four years in college. Two of the Deacon's sons succeeded him on the farm. One was his successor in his office in the church. Another son, George Farrar, graduated at Amherst where he was cotemporary with Dr. Storrs and Henry Ward Beecher. He died a few years after his admission to the Bar. But he had already given proof that he would, if he had lived, have taken rank among the foremost at the Bar in Massachusetts.

Before entering college I was for about six months a pupil of Mrs. Sarah Ripley of Waltham. She removed to Concord with her husband afterward. She was one of the most wonderful scholars of her time, or indeed of any time. President Everett said she could fill any professor's chair at Harvard. She was an admirable mathematician. She read the "Mecanique Celeste" of Laplace in the original without the aid of Dr. Bowditch's translation. She was a fine German and Italian scholar. She had a great fondness for Greek literature, especially for Plato and AEschylus. She was an accomplished naturalist. She was simple as a child, an admirable wife and mother, performing perfectly all the commonest duties of the household. The authorities of Harvard used to send boys to her who were rusticated for some offence. She would keep them along in all their studies, in most cases better instructed than they would have been if they had stayed in Cambridge. I remember her now with the strongest feeling of reverence, affection and gratitude. In that I say what every other pupil of hers would say. I do not think she ever knew how much her boys loved her.

In 1876 the Directors of the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia took steps to have the lives of three or four of the foremost women of the century that had just passed written as the best examples of American womanhood for our first century. Mrs. Schuyler was selected from New York, Mrs. Livermore from New Hampshire, and Mrs. Randolph from Virginia. Mrs. Ripley was chosen as the representative of Massachusetts. If anybody doubt the capacity of the intellect of woman to rival that of man in any calling requiring the highest intellectual capacity, without in the least forfeiting any quality of a delicate womanhood, let him read the "Life of Sarah Ripley."

After her death Mr. Emerson wrote the following notice of her. It is not found in his collected works.

"Died in Concord, Massachusetts, on the 26th of July, 1867, Mrs. Sarah Alden Ripley, aged seventy-four years. The death of this lady, widely known and beloved, will be sincerely deplored by many persons scattered in distant parts of the country, who have known her rare accomplishments and the singular loveliness of her character. A lineal descendant of the first governor of Plymouth Colony, she was happily born and bred. Her father, Gamaliel Bradford, was a sea-captain of marked ability, with heroic traits which old men will still remember, and though a man of action yet adding a taste for letters. Her brothers, younger than herself, were scholars, but her own taste for study was even more decided. At a time when perhaps no other young woman read Greek, she acquired the language with ease and read Plato,—adding soon the advantage of German commentators.

"After her marriage, when her husband, the well-known clergyman of Waltham, received boys in his house to be fitted for college, she assumed the advanced instruction in Greek and Latin, and did not fail to turn it to account by extending her studies in both languages. It soon happened that students from Cambridge were put under her private instruction and oversight. If the young men shared her delight in the book, she was interested at once to lead them to higher steps and more difficult but not less engaging authors, and they soon learned to prize the new world of thought and history thus opened. Her best pupils became her lasting friends. She became one of the best Greek scholars in the country, and continued, in her latest years, the habit of reading Homer, the tragedians, and Plato. But her studies took a wide range in mathematics, in natural philosophy, in psychology, in theology, as well as in ancient and modern literature. She had always a keen ear open to whatever new facts astronomy, chemistry, of the theories of light and heat had to furnish. Any knowledge, all knowledge was welcome. Her stores increased day by day. She was absolutely without pedantry. Nobody ever heard of her learning until a necessity came for its use, and then nothing could be more simple than her solution of the problem proposed to her. The most intellectual gladly conversed with one whose knowledge, however rich and varied, was always with her only the means of new acquisition. Meantime her mind was purely receptive. She had no ambition to propound a theory, or to write her own name on any book, or plant, or opinion. Her delight in books was not tainted by any wish to shine, or any appetite for praise or influence. She seldom and unwillingly used a pen, and only for necessity or affection.

"But this wide and successful study was, during all the hours of middle life, only the work of hours stolen from sleep, or was combined with some household task which occupied the hands and left the eyes free. She was faithful to all the duties of wife and mother in a well-ordered and eminently hospitable household, wherein she was dearly loved, and where

'her heart Life's lowliest duties on itself did lay.'

"She was not only the most amiable, but the tenderest of women, wholly sincere, thoughtful for others, and, though careless of appearances, submitting with docility to the better arrangements with which her children or friends insisted on supplementing her own negligence of dress; for her own part indulging her children in the greatest freedom, assured that their own reflection, as it opened, would supply all needed checks. She was absolutely without appetite for luxury, or display, or praise, or influence, with entire indifference to trifles. Not long before her marriage, one of her intimate friends in the city, whose family were removing, proposed to her to go with her to the new house, and, taking some articles in her own hand, by way of trial artfully put into her hand a broom, whilst she kept her in free conversation on some speculative points, and this she faithfully carried across Boston Common, from Summer Street to Hancock Street, without hesitation or remark.

"Though entirely domestic in her habit and inclination, she was everywhere a welcome visitor, and a favorite of society, when she rarely entered it. The elegance of her tastes recommended her to the elegant, who were swift to distinguish her as they found her simple manners faultless. With her singular simplicity and purity, such as society could not spoil, nor much affect, she was only entertained by it, and really went into it as children into a theatre,—to be diverted,—while her ready sympathy enjoyed whatever beauty of person, manners, or ornament it had to show. If there was conversation, if there were thought or learning, her interest was commanded, and she gave herself up to the happiness of the hour.

"As she advanced in life, her personal beauty, not remarked in her youth, drew the notice of all, and age brought no fault but the brief decay and eclipse of her intellectual powers."

In 1833, three years before Emerson wrote "Nature," Mrs. Ripley said of him: "We regard him still, more than ever, as the apostle of the Eternal Reason. We do not like to hear the crows, as Pindar says, caw at the bird of Jove."*

[Footnote] * On the stone which marks Mrs. Ripley's grave in the beautiful cemetery at Concord, her children placed an inscription containing a part of the passage with which Tacitus ends his Life of Agricola. "It was a passage which was specially dear to her," says her biographer; "many of her friends will recall the fine glow of feeling with which she read or quoted it; and to these it will always be associated with her memory. I cannot better close this imperfect sketch of her life than by giving the whole of it: of no one was it ever more worthily spoken than of her. The words enclosed in brackets are those which are on her gravestone."

"Si quis piorum manibus locus; si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum corpore exstinguunter magnae animae; (placide quescas, nosque, domum tuam, ab tuarum voces, quas neque lugeri neque plangi fas est: admiratione te potius, temporalibus laudibus, et, si natura suppedit, similitudine decoremus.) Is verus honos, ea conjunctissimi cujusque pietas. Id filiae quoque uxorique praeceperim, sic patris, sic mariti memoriam venerari, ut omnia facta dictaque ejus secum revlvant; famamque ac figuram animi magis quam corporis complectantur: non quia intercedendum putem imaginibus, quae marmore aut aere finguntur, sed ut vultus hominum, ita simulacra vultus imbecilla ne mortalia sunt, forma mentis aeterna, quam tenere et exprimere non per alienam materiam et artem, sed tuis ipse moribus posis. Quidquid ex Agricola amavimus, quidquid mirati sumus, manet mansurumque est in animis hominum, in aeternitate temporum, fama rerum. Nam multos veterum, velut inglorios et ignobiles oblivio obruet: Agricola posteritati narratus et superstes erit." [End of Footnote]

CHAPTER VII HARVARD SIXTY YEARS AGO

I do not think Harvard College had changed very much when I entered it on my sixteenth birthday in the year 1842 either in manners, character of students or teachers, or the course of instruction, for nearly a century. There were some elementary lectures and recitations in astronomy and mechanics. There was a short course of lectures on chemistry, accompanied by exhibiting a few experiments. But the students had no opportunity for laboratory work. There was a delightful course of instruction from Dr. Walker in ethics and metaphysics. The college had rejected the old Calvinistic creed of New England and substituted in its stead the strict Unitarianism of Dr. Ware and Andrews Norton,—a creed in its substance hardly more tolerant or liberal than that which it had supplanted. There was also some instruction in modern languages,—German, French and Italian,—all of very slight value. But the substance of the instruction consisted in learning to translate rather easy Latin and Greek, writing Latin, and courses in algebra and geometry not very far advanced.

The conditions of admission were quite easy. They were such as a boy of fourteen of good capacity, who could read and write the English language and had gone through some simple book of arithmetic, could easily master in two years. There were three or four schools were the boys were pretty well fitted, so that they could translate Cicero and Virgil, Nepos and Sallust and Caesar and Xenophon and Homer. The Boston Latin School, the Roxbury Latin School, Phillips Academy at Exeter and Phillips Academy at Andover and Mrs. Ripley's school at Waltham were the best schools for this purpose. The boys from the Boston Latin School generally took their places at the head of the class when they entered. Next came the best scholars from the other schools I have named. But the bulk of the pupils were very poorly fitted.