"On leaving the dinner-table, the invited guests, with many of the citizens, repaired to the court-house to pay their respects to the ladies of Concord, who had there, with their friends, partaken of an elegant collation, and now politely offered coffee to the gentlemen. The hall, in which the collation was spread, had been decorated by fair hands with festoons of flowers, and wreaths of evergreen, and hung with pictures of the Fathers of the Town. Crowded as it was with graceful forms and happy faces, and resounding with the hum of animated conversation, it was itself a beautiful living picture. Compared with the poverty and savageness of the seene which the same spot presented two hundred years ago, it was a brilliant reverse of the medal; and could scarcely fail, like all the parts of the holiday, to lead the reflecting mind to thoughts of that Divine Providence, which, in every generation, has been our tower of defence and horn of blessing.

"At sunset the company separated and retired to their homes; and the evening of this day of excitement was as quiet as a Sabbath throughout the village."

Within the year, Mr. Emerson had come to make his home for life in the ancestral town, and had become a householder. Two days after the festival, he drove to Plymouth in a chaise, and was there married to Lidian Jackson, and immediately brought his bride to her Concord home.

His aged step-grandfather was the senior chaplain at the Celebration, and his brother Charles, who was to live with him in the new home, was one of the marshals.

In preparation for this address Mr. Emerson made diligent examination of the old town records, and spent a fortnight in Cambridge consulting the works on early New England in the College Library. I reproduce most of his references to his

authorities exactly, although there are, no doubt, newer edi tions of some of the works.

Page 30, note 1. This story is from Bede's Ecclesiastical History (chapter xiii., Bohn's Antiquarian Library). Mr. Emerson used it in full as the exordium of his essay on Immortality, in Letters and Social Aims.

Page 30, note 2. The poem "Hamatreya," wherein appear the names of many of these first settlers, might well be read in connection with the opening passages of this address.

Mr. Emerson's right of descent to speak as representative of Peter Bulkeley, who was the spiritual arm of the settlement, as Simon Willard was its sword-arm, may here be shown Rev. Joseph Emerson of Mendon (son of Thomas of Ipswich, the first of the name in this country) married Elizabeth, daughter of Rev. Edward Bulkeley, who succeeded his father, the Rev. Peter Bulkeley, as minister of Concord. Edward, the son of Joseph of Mendon and Elizabeth Bulkeley, was father of Rev. Joseph Emerson of Malden, who was father of Rev. William Emerson of Concord, who was father of Rev. William Emerson of Harvard and Boston, the father of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Page 31, note 1. Neal's History of New England, vol. i., P. 132.

Page 31, note 2.

Page 31, note 3.

Page 32, note I.

Neal, vol. i., p. 321.

Shattuck's History of Concord, p. 158.
On September 2, 1635, the General

Court passed this order:

It is ordered that there shalbe a plantačon att Musketequid & that there shalbe 6 myles of land square to belong to it, & that the inhabitants thereof shall have three yeares imunities from all publ[ic] charges except traineings; Further, that

when any that plant there shall have occačon of carryeing of goods thither, they shall repaire to two of the nexte magistrates where the teames are, whoe shall have the power for a yeare

to presse draughts, att reasonable rates, to be payed by the owners of the goods, to transport their goods thither att seasonable tymes: & the name of the place is changed & here after to be called Concord.'

Page 32, note 2. Shattuck, p. 5.

Page 33, note 1. In his lecture on Boston (published in the volume Natural History of Intellect) Mr. Emerson gives an amusing enumeration of some troubles which seemed so great to the newcomers from the Old World: he mentions their fear of lions, the accident to John Smith from " the most poisonous tail of a fish called a sting-ray," the circumstance of the overpowering effect of the sweet fern upon the Concord party, and the intoxicating effect of wild grapes eaten by the Norse explorers, and adds: "Nature has never again indulged in these exasperations. It seems to have been the last outrage ever committed by the sting-rays, or by the sweet fern, or by the fox-grapes. They have been of peaceable behavior ever since."

Page 34, note 1. Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence, chap. xxxv. Mr. Emerson abridged and slightly altered some

sentences.

Page 35, note 1. Mourt, Beginning of Plymouth, 1621,

P. 60.

Page 35, note 2. Johnson, p. 56. Josselyn, in his New England's Rarities Discovered, speaks with respect of " Squashes, but more truly squontersquashes; a kind of mellon, or rather gourd;.... some of these are green; some yellow; some longish like a gourd; others round, like an apple: all of them pleasant food, boyled and buttered, and seasoned with spice.

But the yellow squash called an apple-squash (because like an apple) and about the bigness of a pome-water is the best kind." Wood, in his New England Prospect, says: In summer, when their corn is spent, isquotersquashes is their best bread, a fruit much like a pumpion."

Page 36, note 1. Nashawtuck, a small and shapely hill between the Musketaquid and the Assabet streams, at their point of union, was a pleasant and convenient headquarters for a sagamore of a race whose best roadway for travel and transportation was a deep, quiet stream, the fish of which they ate, and also used for manure for their cornfields along the bluffs. Indian graves have been found on this hill.

Page 36, note 2. Josselyn's Voyages to New England, 1638.

Page 36, note 3. Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts, vol. i., chap. 6.

Page 36, note 4. Thomas Morton, New England Canaan, P. 47.

Page 37, note 1. Shattuck, p. 6.

The old Middlesex Hotel, which stood during the greater part of the nineteenth century on the southwest side of the Common, opposite the court- and town-houses, had fallen into decay in 1900, and was bought and taken down by the town' as an improvement to the public square to commemorate the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of Concord Fight. It is probable that Jethro's Oak, under which the treaty was made, stood a little nearer the house of Rev. Peter Bulkeley, the site of which, about one hundred paces distant on the Lowell road, is now marked by a stone and bronze tablet.

Page 38, note 1. Depositions taken in 1684, and copied in the first volume of the Town Records.

Page 39, note 1. Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence.

Page 39, note 2.

New England's Plantation.

Page 39, note 3.

E. W.'s Letter in Mourt, 1621.

Page 40, note 1. Peter Bulkeley's Gospel Covenant; preached at Concord in New England. 2d edition, London, 1651, p. 432.

Page 41, note 1. See petition in Shattuck's History, p. 14. Page 41, note 2. Shattuck, p. 14. This was the meadow and upland on the Lowell road, one mile north of Concord, just beyond the river. On the farm stands the unpainted lean-to" house, now owned by the daughters of the late Edmund Hosmer.

129, and the editor's note.

Page 46, note 2.

Page 48, note 1.

Winthrop's Journal, vol. ii., p. 160.
Town Records.

With the exception of the anecdotes in this and the following sentence, almost the whole of this account of the theory and practice of the New England town-meeting was used by Mr. Emerson in his oration, given in December, 1870, before the New England Society in New York. The greater part of the matter used in that address is included in the lecture on Boston, in the volume Natural History of Intellect.

The New England Society of New York recently published the Orations delivered before it previous to 1871, including Mr. Emerson's, as far as it could be recovered from the scatered manuscript, and the newspaper reports of the time.