BOYHOOD IN CONCORD I have never got over being a boy.

It does not seem likely that I ever shall.

I have to-day, at the age of three score and sixteen, less sense of my own dignity than I had when at sixteen I walked for the first time into the College Chapel at Harvard, clad as the statute required, in a "black or black- mixed coat, with buttons of the same color," and the admiring world, with its eyes on the venerable freshman, seemed to me to be saying to itself, "Ecce caudam!" Behold the tail! Most men are apt to exaggerate the merits of their birthplace.
But I think everybody who knew the town will agree with me that there never was in the world a better example of a pure and beautiful democracy, in the highest sense of the term, than the town of Concord from 1826 to the close of the war.
If there were any aristocracy, it was an aristocracy of personal worth.

There was little wealth and little poverty.

There were no costly dwellings and no hovels.