place to be born in, and it was surely good to live in the place where Everett and Quincy ruled the academic world; where Longfellow wrote his poetry, and Palfrey his history, and Sparks his biographies; where Washington Allston painted and Margaret Fuller dreamed; where William Story and Richard Dana and Lowell and Holmes and the rest walked to church and stopped to gossip with the neighbors at the post-office. “No town in this country,” says Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “has been the occasion of two literary descriptions more likely to become classic than two which bear reference to the Cambridge of fifty years ago. One of these is Lowell’s well-known _Fireside Travels_ and the other is the scarcely less racy chapter in the _Harvard Book_, contributed by John Holmes, younger brother of the ‘Autocrat.’” To these happy descriptions we may now add the accounts of Colonel Higginson’s boyhood in his _Cheerful Yesterdays_, and Dr. Holmes’s loving story of his birthplace in the _Poet at the Breakfast Table_. “Cambridge,” wrote Lowell, “was still a country village with its own habits and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly the force of suburban gravitation. Approaching it from the west, by what was then called the New Road, you would pause on the brow of Symond’s Hill to [Illustration: GYMNASIUM, HARVARD COLLEGE.] enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massachusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable to emigrate with the Tories, by whom, or by whose fathers, they were planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the College, the square, brown tower of the Episcopal Church, and the slim, yellow spire of the parish meeting-house. On your right the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened here and there with the blossoming black grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. To your left upon the Old Road you saw some half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward.... We called it ‘the Village’ then, and it was essentially an English village--quiet, unspeculative, without enterprise, sufficing to itself, and only showing such differences from the original type as the public school and the system of town government might superinduce. A few houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare common, with ample elbow-room, and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy’s artillery rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia general who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. The hooks were to be seen from which had swung the hammocks of Burgoyne’s captive red-coats. If memory does not deceive me, women still washed