to the metropolis and the Lexington turnpike.

The house of Mr. Emerson stands opposite this junction. It is a plain,
square white dwelling-house, yet it has a city air and could not be
mistaken for a farm-house. A quiet merchant, you would say,
unostentatious and simple, has here hidden himself from town. But a
thick grove of pine and fir trees, almost brushing the two windows
upon the right of the door, and occupying the space between them and
the road, suggests at least a peculiar taste in the retired merchant,
or hints the possibility that he may have sold his place to a poet or
philosopher--or to some old East India sea-captain, perhaps, who
cannot sleep without the sound of waves, and so plants pines to
rustle, surf-like, against his chamber window.

The fact, strangely enough, partly supports your theory. In the year
1828 Charles Coolidge, a brother of J. Templeman Coolidge, a merchant
of repute in Boston and grandson of Joseph Coolidge, a patriarchal
denizen of Bowdoin Square in that city, came to Concord and built this
house. Gratefully remembering the lofty horse-chestnuts which shaded
the city square, and which, perhaps, first inspired him with the wish
to be a nearer neighbor of woods and fields, he planted a row of them
along his lot, which this year ripen their twenty-fifth harvest. With
the liberal hospitality of a New England merchant he did not forget
the spacious cellars of the city, and, as Mr. Emerson writes, "he
built the only good cellar that had then been built in Concord".

Mr. Emerson bought the house in the year 1835. He found it a plain,
convenient, and thoroughly built country residence. An amiable
neighbor of Mr. Coolidge had placed a miserable old barn irregularly
upon the edge of that gentleman's lot, which, for the sake of