that this which is now Concord was once Musketaquid, and that the American race has had its destiny also. Everywhere in the fields, in the corn and grain land, the earth is strewn with the relics of a race which has vanished as completely as if trodden in with the earth. Is it not good to remember the eternity behind me as well as the eternity before? Wherever I go I tread in the tracks of the Indian. I pick up the bolt which he has but just dropped at my feet. And if I consider destiny I am on his trail. I scatter his hearth-stones with my feet, and pick out of the embers of his fire the simple but enduring implements of the wigwam and the chase. In planting my corn in the same furrow which yielded its increase to his support so long, I displace some memorial of him. I have been walking this afternoon over a pleasant field planted with winter rye in a region where this strange people once had their dwelling-place. Another species of mortal men but little less wild to me than the musquash they hunted. Strange spirits, demons, whose eye could never meet mine. With another nature, and another fate than mine. The crows flew over the edge of the woods, and wheeling over my head, seemed to rebuke, as dark-winged spirits more akin to the Indian than I. Perhaps only the present disguise of the Indian. If the new has a meaning, so has the old. . . . .
