excerpts from the Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

For my children, who shared in this great adventure

The crossroads where the swampy meadows below the Cambridge Turnpike rise steeply to the orchards on the other side of the Lexington Road looks like any New England corner; shaded by maples, it is bordered by lush grass in the summer and piles of plowed snow in the winter.

It is my hope that this story will serve as an introduction to that landscape and that the reader will come to love it as I have.