and then to the level of more elevated sentiments and expressions), while it is also descriptive of real scenery and manners.  Yet it must be admitted that the production now in question (which here and there bears perhaps too plainly the marks of my correcting hand) does partake of the nature of a Pastoral, inasmuch as the interlocutors therein are purely imaginary beings, and the whole is little better than [Greek:  kapnou skias onar].  The plot was, as I believe, suggested by the ‘Twa Brigs’ of Robert Burns, a Scottish poet of the last century, as that found its prototype in the ’Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey’ by Fergusson, though, the metre of this latter be different by a foot in each verse.  Perhaps the Two Dogs of Cervantes gave the first hint.  I reminded my talented young parishioner and friend that Concord Bridge had long since yielded to the edacious tooth of Time.  But he answered me to this effect:  that there was no greater mistake of an authour than to suppose the reader had no fancy of his own; that, if once that faculty was to be called into activity, it were better to be in for the whole sheep than the shoulder; and that he knew Concord like a book,—­an expression questionable in propriety, since there are few things with which he is not more familiar than with the printed page.  In proof of what he affirmed, he showed me some verses which with others he had stricken out as too much delaying the action, but which I communicate in this place because they rightly define ‘punkin-seed’ (which Mr. Bartlett would have a kind of perch,—­a creature to which I have found a rod or pole not to be so easily equivalent in our inland waters as in the books of arithmetic) and because it conveys an eulogium on the worthy son of an excellent father, with whose acquaintance (eheu, fugaces anni!) I was formerly honoured.

’But nowadays the Bridge ain’t wut they show,
So much ez Em’son, Hawthorne, an’ Thoreau. 
I know the village, though; was sent there once
A-schoolin’, ’cause to home I played the dunce;
An’ I ‘ve ben sence a visitin’ the Jedge,
Whose garding whispers with the river’s edge,
Where I ’ve sot mornin’s lazy as the bream,
Whose on’y business is to head upstream,
(We call ’em punkin-seed,) or else in chat
Along ’th the Jedge, who covers with his hat
More wit an’ gumption an’ shrewd Yankee sense
Than there is mosses on an ole stone fence.’

Concerning the subject-matter of the verses.  I have not the leisure at present to write so fully as I could wish, my time being occupied with the preparation of a discourse for the forthcoming bicentenary celebration of the first settlement of Jaalam East Parish.  It may gratify the publick interest to mention the circumstance, that my investigations to this end have enabled me to verify the fact (of much historick importance, and hitherto hotly debated) that Shearjashub Tarbox was the first child of white parentage born in this