Towards evening the children would come out of school, and fill the
streets with noise and excitement for a time; the gentlemen would return
from Boston looking quite as much fatigued as if they had been working
all day in a cornfield. The houses on Main Street were mostly so white
as to be hardly distinguishable from the snow in winter, though many of
them belonged, architecturally at least, to the last century, and had
brass knockers on the doors. Yet there was a certain harmony among them;
and it seemed as if the place must always have been as it was at that
time.
There is, however, a compensation in the dullness of country life, which
may be expressed in the word nature. The real architecture of Concord
was not in private or public edifices, but in its magnificent elms,
whose branches spanned the streets like the arches of a Gothic
cathedral. The largest of them stands in front of the town hall, and its
trunk measures just sixteen feet in circumference; though Doctor Holmes
has failed to enumerate it in his list of the great trees of the State.
Another on the road to Lexington is remarkable for its straight stem and
perfect wineglass form. In autumn the scarlet maples set between the
elms are no bad substitute for stained-glass windows.
There were no fine pictures in the town, but every turn of the river
disclosed a landscape equal to a Claude or a Kenset.
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