and I have heard it suggested that he might well have added to his
trilogy, a fourth member, "Yarrow Unrevisited." There is a loss, though
Concord bears the strain better than most places, I think. As we go on
in life the world gets full of ghosts, and at the capital of
transcendentalism I was peculiarly conscious of the haunting of these
spiritual presences. Since I had been there before, Emerson and Alcott
and Ellery Channing and my courteous host and companion, Edward Hoar,
and my kind old landlady Miss Barrett--who had also been Emerson's
landlady and indeed everybody's landlady in Concord, and whom her
youngest boarders addressed affectionately as Emma--all these and many
more had joined the sleepers in Sleepy Hollow. The town itself has
suffered comparatively few changes. True there is a trolley line through
the main street--oddly called "The Milldam," and in Walden wood I met an
automobile not far from the cairn, or stone pile, which marks the site
of Thoreau's cabin. But the woods themselves were intact and the limpid
waters of the pond had not been tapped to furnish power for any electric
light company. The Old Manse looked much the same, and so did the
Wayside and the Orchard House. Not a tree was missing from the mystic
ring of tall pines in front of Emerson's house at the fork of the
Cambridge and Lexington roads. On the central square the ancient tavern
was gone where I had lodged on the night of my arrival and where my
host, a practical philosopher--everyone in Concord had his
philosophy,--took a gloomy view of the local potentialities of the hotel
business. He said there was nothing doing--some milk and asparagus were
raised for the Boston market, but the inhabitants were mostly literary
people. "I suppose," he added, "we've got the smartest literary man in
the country living right here." "You mean Mr. Emerson," I suggested.
"Yes, sir, and a gentleman too."

"And Alcott?" I ventured.

"Oh, Alcott! The best thing he ever did was his daughters."

This inn was gone, but the still more ancient one across the square
remains, the tavern where Major Pitcairn dined on the day of the
Lexington fight, and from whose windows or door steps he is alleged by
the history books to have cried to a group of embattled farmers,
"Disperse, ye Yankee rebels."

Concord is well preserved. Still there are subtle indications of the
flight of time. For one thing, the literary pilgrimage business has
increased, partly no doub