Their wanderings have now brought them into the suburbs of the city,
They stand on a grassy brow of a hill at the foot of a granite
obelisk which points its great finger upwards, as if the human
family had agreed, by a visible symbol of age-long endurance, to
offer some high sacrifice of thanksgiving or supplication. The
solemn height of the monument, its deep simplicity, and the absence
of any vulgar and practical use, all strengthen its effect upon Adam
and Eve, and leave them to interpret it by a purer sentiment than
the builders thought of expressing.

"Eve, it is a visible prayer," observed Adam.

"And we will pray too," she replies.

Let us pardon these poor children of neither father nor mother for
so absurdly mistaking the purport of the memorial which man founded
and woman finished on far-famed Bunker Hill. The idea of war is not
native to their souls. Nor have they sympathies for the brave
defenders of liberty, since oppression is one of their unconjectured
mysteries. Could they guess that the green sward on which they
stand so peacefully was once strewn with human corpses and purple
with their blood, it would equally amaze them that one generation of
men should perpetrate such carnage, and that a subsequent generation
should triumphantly commemorate it.

With a sense of delight they now stroll across green fields and
along the margin of a quiet river. Not to track them too closely,
we next find the wanderers entering a Gothic edifice of gray stone,
where the bygone world has left whatever it deemed worthy of record,