her _nom de plume_ of Margaret Sidney, entertains many
noted people at Wayside. On the Boston road and a little farther on is
the garden of Ephraim Bull, the originator of the Concord grape and
below is Merriam's Corner to which the Minute-men crossed and attacked
the British as above mentioned. Half a mile across country lies Sandy
Pond from which the town has its water supply which can furnish daily
half a million gallons of pure water, each containing only one and
three-fourths grains of solid matter. From Sandy Pond several narrow
wood-roads lead to Walden, a mile distant where Thoreau lived for eight
months at an expense of one dollar and nine cents a month. His house
cost thirty dollars and was built by his own hands with a little help in
raising and in it he wrote Walden, considered by many his best book. Mr.
Thoreau died in May 1862, in the house occupied by the Alcott family on
Main street where many of the principal inhabitants live. At the
junction of this street with Sudbury street stands the Concord Free
Public Library, the generous gift of William Munroe, Esq. which was
dedicated October 1, 1873, and now owns nearly twenty thousand volumes
and numerous works of art, coins and relics, the germs of a gallery
which will be added in future. Behind the many fine estates which front
on Main street, Sudbury river forms another highway and many boats lie
along the green lawns ready to convey their owners up river to Fairhaven
bay, Martha's Point, the Cliffs and Baker Farm, the haunts of the
botanists, fishermen and authors of Concord, or down to Egg Rock where
the South Branch unites with the lovely Assabet to form the Concord
River which leads to the Merrimac by way of Bedford, Billerica and
Lowell. But most of the boats go up the Assabet to the beautiful bend
where the gaunt hemlocks lean over to see their reflection in the amber
stream, past the willows by which kindly hands have hidden the railroad,
to the shaded aisles of the vine-entangled maples where the rowers moor
their boats and climb Lee Hill which Mr. C.H. Hood has so beautifully
laid out.

* * * * *

THE CONSPIRACY OF 1860-61.

By George Lowell Austin.

I.

After the October elections, in the autumn of 1860, had been carried by
the Republicans, the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the
United States, in November, became a foregone conclusion. On the 5th day
of October,--the initial day of the