It was now late in the autumn, and the trees were pretty nearly stripped of their leaves.—­There was no place so favorable as the Common for the study of the heavens.  The skies were brilliant with stars, and the air was just keen enough to remind our young friends that the cold season was at hand.  They wandered round for a while, and at last found themselves under the Great Elm, drawn thither, no doubt, by the magnetism it is so well known to exert over the natives of its own soil and those who have often been under the shadow of its outstretched arms.  The venerable survivor of its contemporaries that flourished in the days when Blackstone rode beneath it on his bull was now a good deal broken by age, yet not without marks of lusty vitality.  It had been wrenched and twisted and battered by so many scores of winters that some of its limbs were crippled and many of its joints were shaky, and but for the support of the iron braces that lent their strong sinews to its more infirm members it would have gone to pieces in the first strenuous northeaster or the first sudden and violent gale from the southwest.  But there it stood, and there it stands as yet,—­though its obituary was long ago written after one of the terrible storms that tore its branches,—­leafing out hopefully in April as if it were trying in its dumb language to lisp “Our Father,” and dropping its slender burden of foliage in October as softly as if it were whispering Amen!

Not far from the ancient and monumental tree lay a small sheet of water, once agile with life and vocal with evening melodies, but now stirred only by the swallow as he dips his wing, or by the morning bath of the English sparrows, those high-headed, thick-bodied, full-feeding, hot-tempered little John Bulls that keep up such a swashing and swabbing and spattering round all the water basins, one might think from the fuss they make about it that a bird never took a bath here before, and that they were the missionaries of ablution to the unwashed Western world.

There are those who speak lightly of this small aqueous expanse, the eye of the sacred enclosure, which has looked unwinking on the happy faces of so many natives and the curious features of so many strangers.  The music of its twilight minstrels has long ceased, but their memory lingers like an echo in the name it bears.  Cherish it, inhabitants of the two-hilled city, once three-hilled; ye who have said to the mountain, “Remove hence,” and turned the sea into dry land!  May no contractor fill his pockets by undertaking to fill thee, thou granite girdled lakelet, or drain the civic purse by drawing off thy waters!  For art thou not the Palladium of our Troy?  Didst thou not, like the Divine image which was the safeguard of Ilium, fall from the skies, and if the Trojan could look with pride upon the heaven-descended form of the Goddess of Wisdom, cannot he who dwells by thy shining oval look in that mirror and contemplate Himself,—­the Native of Boston.