a dream of my excited fancy, but I shall always think of Elmwood as it was that afternoon. I am so fortunate as to have a close association with the town of Concord. My first American ancestor, landing from his ship in 1635, went thither with the earliest settlers and established himself on the level at the west of the town, at that time I suppose the outmost Anglo-Saxon frontier of the Western continent. Seven generations of his descendants have lived in the town. I am in the eighth, and, though not native, and only transiently resident, I have a love for it and it is a town worth loving. It is fair by nature, pleasant hills rising among green levels and the placid river creeping toward the sea. It still maintains its vigorous town-meeting and holds well to the ancient traditions. The thirteen colonies made on its soil their first forcible resistance to British aggression and there is no village in America so associated with great men of letters. When a boy of ten in 1844 I was swapped with a cousin, he going for a year to western New York, while I went for a year to the house of my aunt in Concord, the ancient homestead out of which eighty years before my great-grandfather had gone with gun in hand to take his part with the Minute Men. Emerson had just become famous through _Nature_, Thoreau was then a young man quite unknown to fame. The Alcotts the year before had lived next door to my aunt, Louisa, a child of twelve, and her sisters the "Little Women" whom the world now knows so well. Close to the Battle Ground stood the two tall gate-posts behind which lay the "Old Manse" whose "Mosses" Hawthorne was just then preserving for immortality. With all these I then, or a little later, came into touch and I can tell how the figures looked as scanned by the eyes of a boy.