. I
stood at the gate looking toward the old mansion aloof among the
woods. I had often stood there and looked toward the house, but now
it had a different aspect; usually its doors and windows were tightly
closed, but now everything was wide open, the mourners had not
returned to the house and at the moment no living being was visible.
The windows and the portal looked out upon the late afternoon, in the
dead silence; in the heightened feeling of the moment it seemed to me
that the mansion had come to life, that it missed the fine spirit that
had so lately flown forth from it, that with lids widely apart and
distressful it looked forth into the great spacious heavens after a
loved soul that had passed from it into the world beyond. It was only
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