gesture--A glance like the reveille of a trumpet--The creaking
boots--"The muses are in the woods"--Emerson could not read
Hawthorne--Typical versus individual--Benefit from
child-prattle--Concord-grape Bull--Sounds of distant battle--Politics,
sociology, and grape-culture--The great white fence--Richard Henry
Stoddard--A country youth of genius--Whipple's Attic salt--An
unwritten romance--The consulship retires literature--Louisa's
tragedy--Hard hit--The spiritual sphere of good men--Nearer than in
the world--The return of the pilgrim.

My father's first look at "The Wayside" had been while snow was still
on the ground, and he had reported to his wife that it resembled a
cattle-pen.

But the family advent was effected in June, and although a heavy rain
had fallen while the domestic impedimenta were in transit, wetting the
mattresses and other exposed furniture, yet when the summer sun came
out things began to mend. My mother and Una came a day ahead of the
others, and with the help of carpenters and upholsterers, and a
neighboring Irishman and his wife for cleaning and moving purposes,
they soon got human order into the place of savage chaos. The new
carpet was down in the study, the walls had been already papered and
the wood-work grained, the pictures were hung in their places, and the
books placed on their shelves. By the time the father, the boy, the
baby, and the nurse drove up in the hot afternoon a home had been
created for their reception.

Mr. Emerson was, and he always remained, the hub round which the wheel
of Concord's fortunes slowly and contentedly revolved. He was at this
time between forty-five and fifty years old, in the prime of his