It would be a difficult matter to get at the first American sailor, or to even guess when he existed, but that our continent was once well populated, and that its prehistoric inhabitants sailed the lakes and seas as well as trod the land, is a matter of certainty. Later, when America became known to Europeans, the new comers found Indians well provided with excellent canoes, built of bark or fashioned from logs, but they were "near shore" sailors. The author quotes one instance where a deep sea voyage was undertaken by them in the early days of the English settlers. Certain Carolina Indians, he says, wearied of the white man's sinful ways in trade, thought themselves able to deal direct with the consumers across the "Big Sea Water." So they built several large canoes and loading these with furs and tobacco paddled straight out to sea bound for England. But their ignorance of navigation speedily got the best of their valor. They were never heard of more. The early white navigators of our waters can hardly be considered American sailors. The new found continent was to them of value only for what could be brought away from them in treasure or in merchantable produce, and it was only when an actual and permanent colonization began that a race of native-born sailors was developed on the Atlantic coasts. OLD CONCORD: HER HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS. Ill. By Margaret Sidney. Boston: D. Lothrop Co. Price $3.00. Of all the books of the year there is not one which carries within it such an aroma of peculiar delight as this series of sketches and descriptions of the highways and byways of that most picturesque of towns, Old Concord. Concord is like no other place in New England. There may be other places as beautiful in their way; there are others, perhaps, of more importance in the Commonwealth, and we know there are hundreds of places where there is more active life to the square foot, but with all these admissions Concord still remains a place of special charm, the result and consequence of more causes than we care to analyze. Its picturesqueness and a certain quaintness of the village has always been noticed by visitors, no matter from what part of the globe they may have come. Added to this is the flavor of Revolutionary history, and the atmosphere created by the daily lives and presence for years of three or four of the giants in American literature. Here lived Hawthorne, and Emerson, and Thoreau, and the Alcotts, father and daughter, and the work that they did here has made it a literary Mecca for all time.