village, until one afternoon, some half-dozen or more years since, a
shriek, sharper than any that had rung from Walden woods since the
last war-whoop of the last Indians of Musketaquid, announced to
astonished Concord, drowsing in the river meadows, that the nineteenth
century had overtaken it. Yet long before the material force of the age
bound the town to the rest of the world, the spiritual force of a single
mind in it had attracted attention to it, and made its lonely plains as
dear to many widely scattered minds as the groves of the Academy or the
vineyards of Vaucluse.

Except in causing the erection of the railway buildings and several
dwellings near it, steam has not much changed Concord. It is yet one
of the quiet country towns whose charm is incredible to all but those
who, by loving it, have found it worthy of love. The shire-town of the
great agricultural county of Middlesex, it is not disturbed by the
feverish throb of factories, nor by any roar of inexorable toil but
the few puffs of the locomotive. One day, during the autumn, it is
thronged with the neighboring farmers, who hold their high festival
--the annual cattle-show--there. But the calm tenor of Concord
life is not varied, even on that day, by anything more exciting than
fat oxen and the cud-chewing eloquence of the agricultural dinner. The
population of the region is composed of sturdy, sterling men, worthy
representatives of the ancestors who sowed along the Concord shores,
with their seed-corn and rye, the germs of a prodigious national
greatness. At intervals every day the rattle, roar, and whistle of the
swift shuttle darting to and from the metropolitan heart of New
England, weaving prosperity upon the land, remind those farmers in
their silent fields that the great world yet wags and wrestles. And
the farmer-boy--sweeping with flashing scythe through the river
meadows, whose coarse grass glitters, apt for mowing, in the early