Hawthorne makes this house the abode of Robert Hagburn in "Septimius Felton." Along the brow of the tree-clad ridge which overlooks the place, and to which Bronson Alcott resorted for the morning and evening view, the patriots hastened to intercept the retreat of the British troops, "blackened and bloody." In the depression of the ridge just back of the house we find the spot where "Septimius Felton" shot the young officer, Cyril Norton, and buried him under the trees. On the grave here "Septimius" sat with Rose Garfield and the half-crazed Sibyl Dacy; here grew the crimson flower which he distilled in his "elixir of immortality," and here Sibyl came to die after her draught of the compound.
After the removal of the Alcotts to the Thoreau house in the village, "Apple Slump"--as Louisa sometimes called this orchard home--became the property and residence of that disciple of Hegel, Professor Harris,--once principal of the Summer School of Philosophy, and now the head of the National Bureau of Education at Washington,--who sometimes comes here in summer.
The "Hillside Chapel," erected by Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson, of New York, for the sessions of the Summer Philosophers, is placed among the trees of the orchard adjoining Alcott's old home. It is a plain little structure of wood, tasteful in design, with pointed gables and vine-draped porch and windows. Its embowered walls, unpainted and unplastered, seem "scarcely large enough to contain the wisdom of the world," but they have held assemblages of such lights as Emerson, Alcott, Sanborn, Bartol, McCosh, Holland, Porter, Lathrop, Stedman, Wilder, Hedge, Dr. Jones, Elizabeth Peabody, Ward Howe, Ednah Cheney, and other like seekers and promoters of fundamental truth.
_Sometime Abode of Alcott--Hawthorne--Lathrop--Margaret Sidney--Storied Apartments--Hawthorne's Study--His Mount of Vision--Where Septimius Felton and Rose Garfield dwelt._
On the Lexington road, a little way beyond the Orchard House, is the once Wayside home of Hawthorne, the dwelling in which, at a tender age, Louisa M. Alcott made her first literary essay. It is a curious, wide, straggling, and irregular structure, of varying ages, heights, and styles. The central gambrel-roofed portion was the original house of four rooms, described as the residence of "Septimius Felton;" other rooms have been added at different periods and to serve the need of successive occupants, until an architecturally incongruous and altogether delightful mansion has been produced. To the ugly little square house which Alcott found here in 1845 and christened "Hillside" he added a low wing at each side, the central gable in the front of the old roof, and wide rustic piazzas across the front of the wings. No additions were made during Hawthorne's first residence here, nor during the occupancy of Mrs. Hawthorne's brother, while the novelist was abroad; but when Hawthorne returned to it in 1860, with "most of his family twice as big as when they left," he enlarged one wing by adding the barn to it, heightened the other side-wing, erected two spacious apartments at the back, and crowned the edifice with a square third-story study, which, with its great chimney and many gables, overtops the rambling roofs like an observatory, and may have been suggested by the tower of the Villa Montauto, where he wrote "The Marble Faun." No important changes have been made by the subsequent owners of the place.