This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost.  But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.  “We must look a long way back,” says Raleigh, “to find the Romans giving laws to nations, and their consuls bringing kings and princes bound in chains to Rome in triumph; to see men go to Greece for wisdom, or Ophir for gold; when now nothing remains but a poor paper remembrance of their former condition.”  And yet, in one sense, not so far back as to find the Penacooks and Pawtuckets using bows and arrows and hatchets of stone, on the banks of the Merrimack.  From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.  On beholding an old picture of Concord, as it appeared but seventy-five years ago, with a fair open prospect and a light on trees and river, as if it were broad noon, I find that I had not thought the sun shone in those days, or that men lived in broad daylight then.  Still less do we imagine the sun shining on hill and valley during Philip’s war, on the war-path of Church or Philip, or later of Lovewell or Paugus, with serene summer weather, but they must have lived and fought in a dim twilight or night.

The age of the world is great enough for our imaginations, even according to the Mosaic account, without borrowing any years from the geologist.  From Adam and Eve at one leap sheer down to the deluge, and then through the ancient monarchies, through Babylon and Thebes, Brahma and Abraham, to Greece and the Argonauts; whence we might start again with Orpheus and the Trojan war, the Pyramids and the Olympic games, and Homer and Athens, for our stages; and after a breathing space at the building of Rome, continue our journey down through Odin and Christ to—­America.  It is a wearisome while.  And yet the lives of but sixty old women, such as live under the hill, say of a century each, strung together, are sufficient to reach over the whole ground.  Taking hold of hands they would span the interval from Eve to my own mother.  A respectable tea-party merely,—­whose gossip would be Universal History.  The fourth old woman from myself suckled Columbus,—­the ninth was nurse to the Norman Conqueror,—­the nineteenth was the Virgin Mary,—­the twenty-fourth the Cumaean Sibyl,—­the thirtieth was at the Trojan war and Helen her name,—­the thirty-eighth was Queen Semiramis,—­the sixtieth was Eve the mother of mankind.  So much for the

     “Old woman that lives under the hill,
     And if she’s not gone she lives there still.”

It will not take a very great-granddaughter of hers to be in at the death of Time.