The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 | Page 7

feet from the base and 110 feet from the road in front of the school building or chapel. Orchard House was for years the home of the Alcott family where Louisa wrote and May painted and their father studied philosophy. A broken rustic fence one of the last traces of Mr. Alcott's mechanical skill forms the slight barrier between the grounds at the Orchard House and Wayside, which Mr. Alcott bought in 1845 and a few years later sold to Nathaniel Hawthorne who owned it at the time of his death. The house is a strange mixture of the old and new, as the rear part bears evident traces of antiquity, at the right were the Hawthorne parlors and reception rooms, at the left of the entry his library, sometimes called the den, and in front a small room with a low window separates the dining room from the reception room and the whole is crowned with a tower built by Mr. Hawthorne for a study where he found the quiet and seclusion which he loved. Much of Mr. Hawthorne's composition seems to have been done as he wandered up and down the shady paths which wind in every direction along the terraced hillside, and a small crooked path is still shown as the one worn by the restless step of genius. Mr. G.P. Lathrop who married Rose Hawthorne sold the place to Daniel Lothrop, the Boston publisher, who has thoroughly repaired it and greatly added to its beauty by reverently preserving every landmark in his improvements, and now in summer his accomplished wife, known to the public by her nom de plume of Margaret Sidney, entertains many noted people at Wayside. On the Boston road and a little farther on is the garden of Ephraim Bull, the originator of the Concord grape and below is Merriam's Corner to which the Minute-men crossed and attacked the British as above mentioned. Half a mile across country lies Sandy Pond from which the town has its water supply which can furnish daily half a million gallons of pure water, each containing only one and three-fourths grains of solid matter. From Sandy Pond several narrow wood-roads lead to Walden, a mile distant where Thoreau lived for eight months at an expense of one dollar and nine cents a month. His house cost thirty dollars and was built by his own hands with a little help in raising and in it he wrote Walden, considered by many his best book. Mr. Thoreau died in May 1862, in the house occupied by the Alcott family on Main street where many of the principal inhabitants live. At the junction of this street with Sudbury street stands the Concord Free Public Library, the generous gift of William Munroe, Esq. which was dedicated October 1, 1873, and now owns nearly twenty thousand volumes and numerous works of art, coins and relics, the germs of a gallery which will be added in future. Behind the many fine estates which front on Main street, Sudbury river forms another highway and many boats lie along the green lawns ready to convey their owners up river to Fairhaven bay, Martha's Point, the Cliffs and Baker Farm, the haunts of the botanists, fishermen and authors of Concord, or down to Egg Rock where the South Branch unites with the lovely Assabet to form the Concord River which leads to the Merrimac by way of Bedford, Billerica and Lowell. But most of the boats go up the Assabet to the beautiful bend where the gaunt hemlocks lean over to see their reflection in the amber stream, past the willows by which kindly hands have hidden the railroad, to the shaded aisles of the vine-entangled maples where the rowers moor their boats and climb Lee Hill which Mr. C.H. Hood has so beautifully laid out.
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THE CONSPIRACY OF 1860-61.
By George Lowell Austin.
I.
After the October elections, in the autumn of 1860, had been carried by the Republicans, the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, in November, became a foregone conclusion. On the 5th day of October,--the initial day of the American Rebellion,--Governor Gist, of South Carolina, wrote a confidential circular-letter, which he despatched by special messenger to the governors of the so-called Cotton States. In this letter he requested an "interchange of opinions which he might be at liberty to submit to a consultation of the leading men" of his State. He added that South Carolina would unquestionably call a convention as soon as it was ascertained that a majority of Lincoln electors were chosen in the then pending presidential election. "If a single State secedes," he wrote, "she will follow her. If no other State takes the lead, South Carolina will secede; in my opinion, alone, if she