folding its sweet-scented flowers each spring,
to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by
children's hands, in front-yard plots--now standing by wallsides in
retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests;--the last of
that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children
think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the
ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself
so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and
grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone
wanderer a half-century after they had grown up and died--blossoming as
fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still
tender, civil, cheerful lilac colors.

But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail while
Concord keeps its ground? Were there no natural advantages--no water
privileges, forsooth? Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool Brister's
Spring--privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at these, all
unimproved by these men but to dilute their glass. They were universally
a thirsty race. Might not the basket, stable-broom, mat-making,
corn-parching, linen-spinning, and pottery business have thrived here,
making the wilderness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity
have inherited the land of their fathers? The sterile soil would at
least have been proof against a low-land degeneracy. Alas! how little
does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the
landscape! Again, perhaps, Nature will try, with me for a first settler,
and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet.

I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy.
Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose
materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and
accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will
be destroyed. With such reminiscences I repeopled the woods and lulled
myself asleep.

At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest no
wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight at a time, but
there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which
are said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even without
food; or like that early settler's family in the town of Sutton, in this
State, whose cottage was completely cov