interesting and noble story. I
can remember now how the tears ran down my cheeks as I read
Scott's description of finding the bones of Robert Bruce in
the old abbey at Dunfermline:

"As the church would not hold half the numbers, the people
were allowed to pass through it one after another, that each
one, the poorest as well as the richest, might see all that
remained of the great king, Robert Bruce. Many people shed
tears; for there was the wasted skull which once was the head,
that thought so wisely and boldly for his country's deliverance;
and there was the dry bone which had once been the sturdy
arm that killed Sir Henry de Bohun, between the two armies,
at a single blow on the evening before the Battle of Bannockburn."

I account it one of the chief blessings of my life that my
boyhood was spent in the pure, noble and simple society of
the people of Concord. I am afraid I did not do it much
credit then. Old Dr. Bartlett, one of the worthiest and
kindliest of men, but who always uttered what was in his
heart, said after my two oldest brothers and I had grown
up, that Samuel Hoar's boys used to be the three biggest
rascals in Concord, but they all seemed to have turned out
pretty well. I have so far kept this statement strictly from
the knowledge of the Democratic papers. But I suppose it
is too late to do any harm now.

CHAPTER V
FAMOUS CONCORD MEN

There were in Concord in my boyhood three writers who afterward
became very famous indeed--Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau.
Mr. Lowell said that these three names shine among all others
in American literature as the three blazing stars in the belt
of Orion shine in the sky.

The town is represented in the beautiful building of the
Congressional Library at Washington by busts of Emerson and
Hawthorne on the outside front of the building; by Emerson's
name on the mosaic ceiling in the entrance pavilion, and by
three sentences from his writings inscribed on the walls.
There are two out of eight such busts. It is also represented
by two figures, a symbolic Statue of History, and a bronze
Statue of Herodotus, both by Daniel Chester French, the sculptor,
a Concord man.

Emerson came to live in Concord in the summer of 1835. Although
he was born in Boston and went to school there, he belonged
to the town by virtue of his descent from a race of Concord
ministers who held the pulpit, with very brief intervals,
from 1635 to 1841. But I do not think his influ