154 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



i 

 Bridges, too, have always been a strategic point in 



times of war bottle necks for defence; and our con- 

 sciousness carries the memory of this fact. We have 

 all fought with Horatius by the yellow Tiber, upon 

 the farther side, while Roman axes hewed down the 

 timbers behind us! We have all been proud, who 

 could, that some ancestor of ours fired one of those 

 shots heard, round the world, "by the rude bridge that 

 spanned the flood" of the Concord River (the flood 

 being, to be sure, a small, dark, sluggish, quiet stream 

 meandering through peaceful meadows). But the rude 

 span which crossed it was unquestionably a bridge, and 

 the stream too wide to jump, so the point was strategic, 

 and on one side stood the redcoats, on the other the 

 embattled farmers of Middlesex, and the rifles spoke 

 which made a nation free. All boys have fought beside 

 Napoleon, and know the bridge of Lodi. All boys, 

 living in the tales of battles (which to them are history), 

 know a hundred bridges, great and small, where an 

 advance was checked or a rear guard successfully cov- 

 ered a retreat; and every boy sees the reason for this 

 strategic importance of bridges and looks upon them 

 with interest and respect. 



Then, too, there is the bridge Caesar built across the 

 Rhine which wakes, perhaps, less pleasant memories. 

 Nor must London Bridge be forgotten, which in our 

 early childhood was in constant process of falling down, 

 to a tune we shall never forget. The mammoth im- 



