Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/32

14 to his brother in 1837, under guise of "Tahatawan, to his brother sachem, Hopewell of Hopewell." It preserves the dialect and superstitious phrases of Indian epistles, and abounds in deft, droll allusions to both traditions of the primeval settlers and also to current political and social incidents.

In the days of anti-slavery conflict, Thoreau often appealed to his townsmen for a revival of that spirit of resistance to oppression and wrong, which had given to the name of Concord primal rank in the making of independent American history. His own ancestors were buried on the hillside, hard by the powder-house and site of the liberty pole, and close to the graves of Major Buttrick and his heroes of that immemorial April day of 1775. Opposite was the old Unitarian church, where the Provincial Congress had convened in 1774. At the Old North Bridge, where nature seems at her apogee of peaceful beauty, had already been erected the first monument to Concord valor. As her men had enrolled themselves upon the side of right and liberty in the earlier struggle, so again she took preeminent part in behalf of free speech and defiance to any laws which openly or covertly favored slavery. Here centred vital thoughts and acts at the time of John Brown's martyrdom. To Concord, though it was not, as has been averred, a