"When I was of smallest dimensions," he says at another time, "and wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village town and stop opposite a low, brown, gambrel-roofed cottage. Out of it would come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and bending over her flower bed, would gather a 'posy,' as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard, with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage, garden-bed, posies, grenadier-like rows of seeding-onions--stateliest of vegetables--all are gone, but the breath of a marigold brings them all back to me." Of Cambridge at this time, James Russell Lowell, in his _Fireside Travels_, tells us: "It 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 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 clothes in the town spring, clear as that of Bandusia. One coach sufficed for all the travel to the metropolis. Commencement had not ceased to be the great holiday of the Boston commonwealth, and a fitting one it was. The students (scholars they were called then) wore their sober uniform, not ostentatiously distinctive, or capable of rousing democratic envy; and the old lines of caste were blurred rather than rubbed out, as servitor