They had been pacing up and down the Long Walk by Beacon Street, from which one looks across the broad, park-like stretch of the Common--that Common whose grey, bright-eyed squirrels are so confiding, and whose air is so good from the sea. To-day the oldest of the elms, that kept record of the past as wisely as any archives, have yielded to the winds and to the tooth of time. The growth of these trees is very different from that of our English species, and their long, curving branches rib the vault of sky overhead. The two men went over the historic hill--where now the gilded dome of the State House glows richly against the sky--descending through picturesquely narrow streets, full of memories and echoes of old days, to their destination at the American House. FOOTNOTES: [239] _Cf._ useful ed. of his speeches recently added to "Unit Library". [240] Thoreau's _A Plea for Captain J. B._, and _The Last Days of J. B._ [241] Kennedy, 49. [242] Address at Cooper Inst., 27th February, 1860. [243] Among the MSS. Traubel is a first draft for a novel (?) dealing with a woman of this class. [244] Dr. D. B. St. J. Roosa in _N.Y. Mail and Express_. [245] Donaldson, 208. [246] W. D. Howells, _Lity. Friends and Acq._, 74. [247] Kennedy, 70. [248] Bucke, 26, 38. [249] _Mem. Hist. N.Y._, iii., 458-60. [250] _Cf._ _Mem. Hist. N.Y._, iii., 464, etc. [251] _Ib._, iii., 468. [252] Kennedy, 69. [253] In possession of Mr. J. H. Johnston, of New York. Reproduced as frontispiece to _Comp. Prose_. [254] Kennedy, 44; Bucke, 33; Burroughs, 20, 21. [255] Mr. Trowbridge. [256] _Comp. Prose_, 385-87. [257] _Ib._, 226, 227. [258] _Father Taylor, the Sailor Preacher_, by G. Haven and T. Russell, 1877. [259] _Comp. Prose_, 386. [260] Kennedy, 76, 77; _cf._ _Comp. Prose_, 315-17; Burroughs (_a_), 67, etc. [261] Burroughs, 144. [262] _L. of G._, 81. [263] _Two Theosophical Letters_, ii., 11. [264] Bucke, 144, 145; _Comp. Prose_, 184. CHAPTER X THE TESTAMENT OF A COMRADE What the theory was from which even Emerson's eloquence could not persuade Whitman, we may understand better if we take up the new volume, turning the pages which were now being added to it, till toward the end we come upon the matter of debate. Though handsomer and pleasanter to handle than its predecessor, this Boston edition still wears a countryman's dress; a heavily stamped orange cover which threatens the symmetry of any library shelf. Evidently, Whitman did not intend it to lie there in peace. It was to be different from the rest, and bad company for them. It opens on a reproduction of the 1859 painting, which faces an odd-looking lithographed and beflourished title-page. The old Preface has gone for good, and now its place is taken by a _Proto-Leaf_ or Summary, by way of introduction.[265]