HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. NO. VI.--NOVEMBER, 1850.--VOL. I. A PILGRIMAGE TO THE CRADLE OF AMERICAN LIBERTY. WITH PEN AND PENCIL. BY BENSON J. LOSSING.[1] "How suddenly that straight and glittering shaft Shot thwart the earth! in crown of living fire Up comes the day! As if they conscious quaff'd The sunny flood, hill, forest, city spire Laugh in the waking light." RICHARD H. DANA. [Illustration: I]t was a glorious October morning, mild and brilliant, when I left Boston to visit Concord and Lexington. A gentle land-breeze during the night had borne the clouds back to their ocean birth-place, and not a trace of the storm was left except in the saturated earth. Health returned with the clear sky, and I felt a rejuvenescence in every vein and muscle when, at dawn, I strolled over the natural glory of Boston, its broad and beautifully-arbored Common. I breakfasted at six, and at half-past seven left the station of the Fitchburg rail-way for Concord, seventeen miles northwest of Boston. The country through which the road passed is rough and broken, but thickly settled. I arrived at the Concord station, about half a mile from the centre of the village, before nine o'clock, and procuring a conveyance, and an intelligent young man for a guide, proceeded at once to visit the localities of interest in the vicinity. We rode to the residence of Major James Barrett, a surviving grandson of Colonel Barrett, about two miles north of the village, and near the residence of his venerated ancestor. Major Barrett was eighty-seven years of age when I visited him; and his wife, with whom he had lived nearly sixty years, was eighty. Like most of the few survivors of the Revolution, they were remarkable for their mental and bodily vigor. Both, I believe, still live. The old lady--a small, well-formed woman--was as sprightly as a girl of twenty, and moved about the house with the nimbleness of foot of a matron in the prime of life. I was charmed with her vivacity, and the sunny radiance which it seemed to shed throughout her household; and the half hour that I passed with that venerable couple is a green spot in the memory.