detect the final cause of such a river. Yet the dreaming idler has a
place on maps and a name in history.

Near the town it is crossed by three or four bridges. One is a massive
structure to help the railroad over. The stern, strong pile readily
betrays that it is part of good, solid stock, owned in the right
quarter. Close by it is a little arched stone bridge, auxiliary to a
great road leading to some vague region of the world called Acton upon
guide-posts and on maps. Just beyond these bridges the river bends and
forgets the railroad, but it is grateful to the graceful arch of the
little stone bridge for making its curve more picturesque, and, as it
muses towards the Old Manse, listlessly brushing the lilies, it
wonders if Ellery Channing, who lives beyond, upon a hill-side sloping
to the shore, wrote his poem of "The Bridge" to that particular one.
There are two or three wooden bridges also, always combining well with
the landscape, always making and suggesting pictures.

The Concord, as I said, has a name in history. Near one of the wooden
bridges you turn aside from the main road, close by the Old Mause
--whose mosses of mystic hue were gathered by Hawthorne, who lived
there for three years--and a few steps bring you to the river and to
a small monument upon its brink. It is a narrow, grassy way; not a
field nor a meadow, but of that shape and character which would
perplex the animated stranger from the city, who would see, also, its
unfitness for a building-lot. The narrow, grassy way is the old road,
which in the month of April, 1775, led to a bridge that crossed the
stream at this spot. And upon the river's margin, upon the bridge and
the shore beyond, took place the sharp struggle between the Middlesex
farmers and the scarlet British soldiers known in tradition as
"Concord fight". The small monument records the day and the event.