It is perhaps known, but not always remembered, that of the twenty or thirty Concords in the United States, the very first one was what its residents have fondly called "Old Concord," ever since 1775, when other States began to name towns for the scene of "the first organized resistance to British aggression." This town on its river of the same name, was so called (by tradition) in honor of the harmony and peace in which the stolid Indians received the pious Puritans from Bedford and Kent, who in 1635 came to plant farms by a stream as slow as the Ouse, that ran, or rather loitered, by the prison in which Bunyan, a few years later, dreamed out his immortal romance of a Christian life. This concord between the red men and the white lasted, unbroken, for some forty years, but was shattered by the plot of King Philip; yet in that interval the village got its name established, and the good old Parson Bulkeley, who gave it, had gone to his grave, exactly where, no descendant knows, although the small God's Acre near the old garrison house (still a good habitable dwelling) is known to hold his remains somewhere in its literal acre. His parsonage house long since fell to ruin; but several houses, built before Peter Bulkeley died in 1659, are, like this enlarged garrison house, known to date between 1650 and 1660.

Among them is the house where Louisa Alcott wrote her "Little Women" and several of her later books; and where her father, Bronson Alcott, composed several of the volumes that he published between 1858, when he first occupied this house, and October, 1877, when the family left it for the more conveniently situated Thoreau-Alcott house, near the Fitchburg railroad station and the line of the electric cars, which will carry the tourist to Cambridge

elder daughters were beginning to make their way in the little world of Boston and its suburbs; and their father was holding those Conversations in Boston, which for a few years were a feature of life in that city, as Margaret Fuller's conversations had been, some years before that. But in 1846 Margaret had gone to England, France and Italy, never to return alive; and her pleasing sister Ellen, had married Ellery Channing, and come to make a home in Concord for more than ten years. Her husband, who long survived her (dying in 1901)

Strange fisherman! whose highest aim but soars
(With watery shoe unconscious of a leak)
To whirl the pickerel on the grassy bank!
But while our fisher dreams,-or greasy gunner,
Lank, with ebon locks, shies o'er the fences,
And down can crack the birds,-game-law forgot,-
And still upon the outskirts of the town

A tawny tribe denudes the cranberry-bed,-
Wild life remains; we still can sign that Time
Is not all sold, like grains to the forestaller;
But still that we, even as the Indian did,
Clasp palm to Nature's palm, and pressure close
Deal with the infinite.

September Flowers.

O why so soon? most princely Golden-rod,
So soon appear? Why, yesterday, all Summer!
But now,--thy nodding plumes convert our hopes

continued to live mostly in Concord; and, like Emerson and Thoreau, to describe or suggest its picturesque scenery in verse. Two blank-verse poems of his, "Near Home" in 1858, and "The Wanderer" in 1872, contained such Wordsworthian passages as the following, as well as portraits in verse of his friends, Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, and some younger associates:

Fisherman by the Musketaquid

Here, thing eternal, day begins not, ends not,
And the night stealing but half-ushered in
Steeps in the trembling wave her pillowed stars.
Here but the solitary fisher comes,-
More like a weedy tuft than living man,-
And, half-concealed along the green copse-side,
Or on the shore, unmoving, calmly spread,
Mimics the maple stump and core of soil.

To Autumn, and endow the verdured lanes
With thy thrice-royal gold: yet like all wealth,
Thou hast a cold and hidden sorrow in thee.
Ye too, meek Asters, Violet's late friends,
Pale, tranquil constellations of the Fall,
That mark a decadence, why do ye strew
Your fair amenities along the paths

Of these continuous woodlands? come so soon,
Ere half the flush of Summer's rosy hours
Had lit the faces of the August hills,
Decked the broad meadows with their base of grass,
Forced Indian corn to flint,-or ere the brood
Of the first April birds had changed their dress.

These lines, like his comrade Thoreau's prose, show that most intimate familiarity with Nature which is the distinguishing mark of the Concord school. They are from "Near Home"; but "The Wanderer" introduces Monadnock, to which Channing

and Thoreau, following Emerson's example, often went,- and I sometimes with Channing, having learned to admire the mountain from its Peterborough side.

Life on Monadnock by Day and Night.

At morn and eve, at rise and hush of day,

I heard the wood-thrush sing on the white spruce,
In this sweet solitude, the Mountain's life;
Its living water, its enchanted air,

So mingling in their crystal clearness fresh,
A sweet peculiar grace from both,-her song,
Voice of the lovely Mountain's favorite tree!

In this upraised seclusion from the race, Then search we out the mazy village roads,

I with Channing, sitting by our low hut in the warm days of late September, 1869.

With this power of poetic or humorous description intermingles in both these poems a strain of ideal thought, characteristic of most of the Concord school of authors. Thus, in a conversation on Love (a favorite theme of these authors), Channing, on Monadnock, replying to a demoiselle says,

In this ideal love I see the life

Of some confiding soul, destined to soar
Beyond the vain realities of earth,
Worshipping forever a superior soul.

Stealing from town to town,-a sweet response
Greeting our hearts where human feet have trod.
Poised in my airy pinnacle, I paint
(The darting swallow whirring swiftly by)
The zigzag coil of alders, a black thread
In serpentine progression of the stream
That plays its echoing flute-notes all the year.
Then village spire, and gleams of pine-clad lake,
And rippling river, playful in the sun;
A glance of human sunshine on the shore
Where Labor pulsates.

All these signs and more
That Earth from this divorce,-O far apart,
What time the dying orb, behind the range,
Gilds the Sierra; and on this the night,
Thrown from his Alpine shoulder, fills our souls.

Here are Jaffrey and Fitzwilliam, and the peak at sunset forcibly pictured, as he had seen them with Thoreau and with Bessie Green,-and

Shall not that star to which I distant tend, Pure in its crystalline seclusion set,Shall not that being,-ever to my thought Utterly sacred, some small grace impart? Raise my dejected fortunes sunk so low? I still forever feel the saint I love, Never by me to be approached more near, A distant vision lighting up my soul.Like Helen to her lover on the heights, Or Beatrice shining through the cloud. The distant view of Monadnock seen from the foreground tree in this picture, on the western slope of the broad pastures of Conantum, was a favorite spectacle for all these authors except Hawthorne; who had more care for human nature than for scenery. In these pastures, as everywhere in Old Concord, grows the "Pearly

Everlasting," as in the next cut, where it was skillfully photographed in August by a disciple of Thoreau from Allentown, Pa., Mr. C. T. Ramsay; whose care in posing his perpetual sitter, Dame Nature, is equal to that of Mr. Herbert Gleason, whose numerous photographs of the haunts of Thoreau, are otherwise the best yet made. The place in this view is what Mr. Ramsay calls "the immortal shore of Lake Walden," showing the bowlders on its gravelly bank, amid which the white flowers grow, but no glimpse of the green water at

with their background of pines and birches.

Retracing upward the course of this river, some halfway from Ball's Hill to Conantum; and very near where Henry Thoreau and his brother John set out, in their home-made boat, for New Concord and the White Mountains in August, 1839, on that memorable voyage down the Concord and up the Merrimack rivers; Mr. Ramsay came to the last home of Ellery Channing; where for ten years, sitting by his west window in the second story, he watched the sunset, as he

its foot. Neither is the water of the Concord River seen, stealing slowly through the Great Meadows and around Ball's Hill; where a naturalist, Mr. William Brewster, has bought 150 acres of woodland along the dark stream, for the main object of allowing his favorite birds there to nest and avoid the gunner just mentioned, who "cracks down" the poor warblers, either for sport or for the market. In this Birds' Paradise, he has long had a bungalow, which Mr. Ramsay approached, as he says, "through the aromatic sweet Pepperbush," and faithfully copied the blossoms

had watched it from the plateau of Monadnock. There, too, he surveyed the stream on which he had sailed or floated so many hundred miles with Thoreau or with Hawthorne, in that same home-made boat which passed from Thoreau to Hawthorne in 1843, and from Hawthorne to Channing in 1845.

This was the sixth house in which

Channing had lived in Concord, since that day in April, 1843, when he came with his bride to the little red cottage on the Cambridge Turnpike, some thirty rods below Emerson's house and garden. From there he moved to an old house on what is now Massachu

setts Avenue (destined to run from Boston to the New Hampshire border in Townsend); thence to his "small cottage on the lonely hill" Ponkatassett, from which he set out for Italy late in 1845; drawing his sea-trunk on a handsled to the railroad station, and calling at the Old Manse on his way, to bid farewell to the learned Mrs. Ripley, then residing there in lieu of of the Hawthornes, with her husband and children. Channing's next remove was to an old ante-Revolutionary house on the main street, where I took lodgings with him in 1855, opposite the then home of Henry Thoreau, with whom I daily dined, and Channing frequently walked.

Years passed, as years always will; Thoreau died in 1862, and Channing sold his house and acre of garden, and the boat-landing for Thoreau under his willows; and in 1866 bought the large building of the Concord Academy, where the two Thoreau brothers had once taught a private school, but which had been made into a dwelling of two tenements. In the westward one of these Channing lived for twentyfive years, leasing the other to forlorn widows at a very small rent. There my wife and I found him, amid his 4,000 books and 2,000 engravings and paintings, ill and infirm, and the forlorn widows too infirm themselves to care for him.

He consented to come to our roomy house, then ten years old, to be nursed and cared for, in September, 1891; and there he remained till his death at Christmas, 1901; writing occasional

verses almost up to his last Thanksgiving day, some of which I included in his "Poems of Sixty-Five Years," printed by two Philadelphia admirers of his verses, a few months after his death.

Old Concord has long since become a Mecca for pilgrimages from all parts of the world to the haunts and graves of its authors. Since the Orchard House was opened in May, 1912, 6,000 persons visited its memorials of the Alcott family in its first six months, at the rate of a thousand a month. They will continue to come, more or less, through the winter and spring, and probably the number will not be less than 10,000 a year in any coming year of this decade.

Louisa Alcott is now by far the most widely read, in English, of all the Concord authors, and even in translations in French and German she must surpass any individual philosopher or poet of her town. In 1890 I found a good modern Greek version of one of her stories for sale in Athens, and carried it the next summer to her niece and namesake, Louisa Nieriker, in Zurich, who is now Mrs. Razim of Vienna. The Orchard House is now the property of the Concord Women's Club, who have restored it and will keep it open for visitors the year round. The Hillside Chapel, where for ten years the School of Philosophy held sessions, is still the property of Mrs. Lothrop (Margaret Sidney) and is removed to her own estate, a few rods northeast of the Orchard House.