field.  He soon after joined the army as chaplain and died the next year at Rutland, and his widow married some years after the Rev. Dr. Ripley who succeeded him in his church and home, and lived until his death in the Manse which has always remained in the possession of his descendants.  Dr. Ripley ruled the church and town with the iron sway of an old-fashioned New England minister, and the old Manse has for years been a literary centre.  In the old dining room, the solemn conclave of clergymen have cracked many a hard doctrine and many a merry jest, seated in the high-backed leather chairs which have stood for one hundred and twenty years around the old table.  Here Mrs. Sarah Ripley fitted many a noted scholar for college in the intervals of her housekeeping labors before the open kitchen fireplace.  In an attic room, called the Saint’s chamber, from the penciled names of honored occupants, Emerson is said to have written Nature, and perhaps other works, as much of his time was spent in the Manse at various periods of his life.  Here Hawthorne came on his wedding tour and lived for two happy years and wrote the Mosses from an Old Manse and other works.  In his study over the dining-room, his name is written with a diamond on one of the little window panes, and with the same instrument his wife has recorded on the dining-room window annals of her daughter who was born in the house.

[Illustration:  Nathaniel Hawthorne.]

On the hill opposite, the solitary poplar, the last of a group set out by some school-girls eighty years ago, still stands.  Each of its companions died about the time of the decease of its lady planter, and as the one who set out the present tree has lately died, the poplar suffered last year from a stroke of lightning which may cause it to follow soon.

Nearly opposite the Manse on the road toward the village is the well preserved house, formerly the home of Elisha Jones, which bears in the L the mark of a bullet fired into it on the day of Concord fight.  On the same side of the way a little farther down is a house, a portion of which was built by Humphrey Barrett as early as 1640.  As the route of the retreating British from the bridge is followed for half a mile down this road the common is reached, which is bounded on the Northern end by the stores, from which the British took flour and other Continental supplies, and at the opposite end stands Wright tavern which the gallant Pitcairn immortalized by stirring his brandy with a bloody finger, unconscious that the rebel blood he promised to stir would cause his own to flow at Bunker Hill.