spiked several cannon, threw several barrels of flour into the river, and proceeded to hunt for the arms and ammunition that were not there. The burning flames from the court house kindled the wrath of the little force of Minute Men, who had seen the ominous clouds of smoke on that April day. Soon four hundred men were on their way to Concord. Two hundred regulars, on arriving, seized the bridge. Here they received and returned the British fire and were only overcome by numbers. Major Buttrick forced them back into the village.

As we gazed across again at the Old Manse we thought of the wonderful essays that had been written here. In the rear of the old house is a delightful study. It was here that Emerson wrote "Nature." Here, too, Hawthorne wrote "Mosses from an Old Manse." We thought of the brave clergyman who, from the north window, commanding a broad view of the river, stood watching the first conflict of a long and deadly struggle between the mother country and her child.

Realizing the danger they were in, the British troops began their retreat of eighteen miles. They had eaten little or nothing for fourteen hours. Ages ago freedomloving Nature had conspired to aid the Americans by shaping the field of battle. Huge boulders had been left by the glacier, the potent rays of the April sun made dense masses of verdure in willows, which thus became an ally of the pine. Stone fences and haystacks became ready-made fortifications, and every rising spot was filled with irate hostile yeoman who harried them with aim true and deadly. They soon began to run and leave their wounded behind, and in place of a retreat their disorderly flight must have had the appearance of a Marathon race, the rattle of musketry acting or serving as signals for each to do his best on the home stretch.

They were almost exhausted when they fell into a little hollow square made by Percy's men to receive them. Here the weary, frightened Redcoats took refuge as in a sanctuary, and immediately threw themselves upon the ground to rest. Many of them had either lost or thrown away their muskets. Pitcairn had lost both his horse and the elegant pistols with which the first shot of the war for independence had been fired. They may now be seen in the town library of Lexington. When the British soldiers reached Arlington, several miles from Boston, they had an obstinate fight with the Yanks. The road swarmed with Minute Men and they could not keep order-but at sunset, when they entered Charlestown under the welcome shelter of the fleet, it was upon the full run. Considered as a race, the British stood far in the lead. Two hundred and seventy-three British were lost and but ninety-three Americans.

As we still lingered on the banks of the sleeping river we recalled these lines from Emerson: "My home stands in lowland with limited outlook, and on the outskirts of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and personalities behind and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight." Alert and watchful still stood the figure near the bridge, and as we turned away from this quiet spot "his attitude of eternal vigilance still seemed prophetic." He became at once the noble spirit of a brave AngloSaxon, standing for Freedom and Right; the spirit that gained our independence; that of 1861 that freed the slave; and that of 1917 that sent the sons of America across the ocean. This glorious Freeman should be placed on some lofty mountain peak in the pure, free air of heaven, where all might read the lesson of Freedom and Human Rights. This is one of America's shrines of which she may be duly proud. Could the European tourist carry back no other memory, it would be well to cross the Atlantic to see this sight. Leaving the guardian at the bridge standing there, we made our way to Sleepy Hollow.

We are not particularly fond of cemeteries, but the knowledge that finally one has to go there himself makes a visit not wholly purposeless. We strolled past the quiet homes to the more quiet plot of ground, "hallowed by many congenial and great souls." Here on a lofty elevation of ground stood the headstones of Louise May Alcott, Thoreau and Channing, with that of Hawthorne enclosed by a fence and withdrawn a short dis

tance.

"What a constellation of stars, whose radiance shall shine on undimmed through countless centuries!"

Here is what Thoreau wrote concerning monuments : "When the stone is a light one and stands upright, pointing to the sky, it does not repress the spirits of the traveler to meditate by it; but these men did seem a little heathenish to us; and so are all large monuments over men's bodies from the Pyramids down."

A monument should at least be "starry-pointing," to indicate whither the spirit has gone, and not prostrate like the body it has deserted. There have been some nations who could do nothing but construct tombs, and these are the only traces they have left. They are the heathen. But why these stones so upright and emphatic like exclamation points? What was there so remarkable that lived? Why should the monument be so much more enduring than the fame which it is designed to commemorate-a stone to a bone? "Here lies.” Why do they not sometimes write, "There rises?" Is it a monument to the body only that is intended? "Having ended the term of his natural life." Would it not be truer to say, "Having ended the term of his unnatural life?" The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth. If any character is given it should be as severely true as the decision of judges, and not the partial testimony of friends. Friends and contemporaries should supply only the name and date, and leave it to posterity to write the epitaph.

OPPOSITE THE OLD SHORE ROAD

The Old World bended low beneath a load
Of bigotry and superstitions dark,
When Liberty, amid the tottering thrones
Of despots born, with gladness filled the homes
Of men, e'en the Eternal City bade
Her gates imperial open wide; and, like
A cloud the darkness lifted from the land.
Then Freedom's gentle, buoyant spirit, like
The Magi's wand, extended far across
The sea, and thereupon the gloomy flood
Was parted wide asunder, and revealed
A glorious paradise for Freedom's sons.
Columbia, beneath thy banner's stars,
The mind of man in rare luxuriance blooms,
Unfolding one by one the attributes

Of deity. In vision we foresee

The perfect man. In form the image of
His Maker, God. In toleration filled
With charity for all. In Reason's Ways
Profound. In thought, he mounts the throne of power
And sways the world. He tries from Nature's grasp
To lure her secrets still untold till we,

Amazed at his bold course, recoil abashed.

-Willis Boughton.

CHAPTER XI

THE OLD SHORE ROAD AND THE PILGRIM SPIRIT

The breaking waves dashed high

On a stern and rock bound coast,

And the woods against the stormy sky
Their giant branches tossed.

"Thus sang Felicia Hemans in the early years of the last century, and anyone who has sailed in by White Horse beach and 'Hither Manomet' when one of those fierce gales that winter brings to this section of the coast sends great billows thundering up against the cliff and churns all the sea into froth and foam, will readily see how truthful this singer has portrayed the scene he has beheld. True, you will not find granite ledges, which follow the coast almost continuously farther north, as at Scituate, Nahant, Rockport, and farther on ; but it is rock-bound, nevertheless, with great heaps of boulders, thickly sown, of various shapes and sizes, with a sombre gray color that makes them appear inexpressibly stern even on a bland summer day."

The most picturesque of all the highways leading from Boston to Plymouth is the South Shore road, passing through Milton, Quincy, Hingham, Scituate, Cohasset, Marshfield, and Duxbury, for one of the chief delights of this route is the frequent glimpses of the sea, whose jagged, rocky coast Nature has softened until we only feel that it is rock bound. When the day is clear how the sunshine dusts the water with purplish bloom, mellowing its hard, cold tint of greenish blue.