tand it better after
spending a day or two in it. Before Mr. Alcott took it in
hand, it was a mean-looking affair, with two peaked gables;
no suggestiveness about it, and no venerableness, although
from the style of its construction it seems to have survived
beyond its first century. He added a porch in front, and a
central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a
rusty olive hue, and invested the whole with a modest
picturesqueness; all which improvements, together with its
situation at the foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that
one notices and remembers for a few moments after passing.
Mr. Alcott expended a good deal of taste and some money (to
no great purpose) in forming the hillside behind the house
into terraces, and building arbours and summer-houses of
rough stems and branches and trees, on a system of his own.
They must have been very pretty in their day, and are so
still, although much decayed, and shattered more and more by
every breeze that blows. The hillside is covered chiefly
with locust trees, which come into luxuriant blossom in the
month of June, and look and smell very sweetly, intermixed
with a few young elms, and white pines and infant oaks--the
whole forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless,
there is some very good shade to be found there. I spend
delectable hours there in the hottest part of the day,
stretched out at my lazy length, with a book in my hand, or
some unwritten book in my thoughts. There is almost always a
breeze stirring along the sides or brow of the hill. From
the hill-top there is a good view along the extensive level
surfaces and gentle hilly outlines, covered with wood, that
characterise the scenery of Concord.... I know nothing of
the history of the house except Thoreau's telling me that it
was inhabited, a generation or two ago, by a man who
believed he should never die. I believe, however, he is
dead; at least, I hope so; else he may probably reappear and
dispute my title to his residence."

As Mr. Lathrop points out, this allusion to a man who believed he
should never die is "the first intimation of the story of _Septimius
Felton_." The scenery of that romance, he adds, "was evidently taken
from the Wayside and its hill." _Septimius Felton_ is in fact a young
man who, at the time of