their life. And the younger people, native to the street, whose earliest
recollections are of creeping over the paternal threshold, and rolling on
the grassy margin of the track, look at it as one of the perdurable
things of our mortal state,--as old as the hills of the great pasture, or
the headland at the harbor's mouth. Their fathers and grandsires tell
them how, within a few years past, the forest stood here, with but a
lonely track beneath its tangled shade. Vain legend! They cannot make
it true and real to their conceptions. With them, moreover, the Main
Street is a street indeed, worthy to hold its way with the thronged and
stately avenues of cities beyond the sea. The old Puritans tell them of
the crowds that hurry along Cheapside and Fleet Street and the Strand,
and of the rush of tumultuous life at Temple Bar. They describe London
Bridge, itself a street, with a row of houses on each side. They speak
of the vast structure of the Tower, and the solemn grandeur of
Westminster Abbey. The children listen, and still inquire if the streets
of London are longer and broader than the one before their father's door;
if the Tower is bigger than the jail in Prison Lane; if the old Abbey
will hold a larger congregation than our meeting-house. Nothing
impresses them, except their own experience.

It seems all a fable, too, that wolves have ever prowled here; and not
less so, that the Squaw Sachem, and the Sagamore her son, once ruled over
this region, and treated as sovereign potentates with the English
settlers, then so few and storm-beaten, now so powerful. There stand
some school-boys, you observe, in a little group around a drunken Indian,
himself a prince of the Squaw Sachem's lineage. He brought hither some
beaver-skins for sale, and has already swallowed the larger portion of
their price, in deadly draughts of firewater. Is there not a touch of
pathos in that picture? and does it not go far towards telling the whole
story of the vast growth and prosperity of one race, and the fated decay