One Summer Day
This Huge Traveller Might Be Seen Moored At Some Meadow's Wharf,
And Another Summer Day It Was Not There.
Where precisely it came
from, or who these men were who knew the rocks and soundings
better than we who bathed there, we could never tell.
We knew
some river's bay only, but they took rivers from end to end.
They were a sort of fabulous river-men to us. It was
inconceivable by what sort of mediation any mere landsman could
hold communication with them. Would they heave to, to gratify
his wishes? No, it was favor enough to know faintly of their
destination, or the time of their possible return. I have seen
them in the summer when the stream ran low, mowing the weeds in
mid-channel, and with hayers' jests cutting broad swaths in three
feet of water, that they might make a passage for their scow,
while the grass in long windrows was carried down the stream,
undried by the rarest hay-weather. We admired unweariedly how
their vessel would float, like a huge chip, sustaining so many
casks of lime, and thousands of bricks, and such heaps of iron
ore, with wheelbarrows aboard, and that, when we stepped on it,
it did not yield to the pressure of our feet. It gave us
confidence in the prevalence of the law of buoyancy, and we
imagined to what infinite uses it might be put. The men appeared
to lead a kind of life on it, and it was whispered that they
slept aboard. Some affirmed that it carried sail, and that such
winds blew here as filled the sails of vessels on the ocean;
which again others much doubted. They had been seen to sail
across our Fair Haven bay by lucky fishers who were out, but
unfortunately others were not there to see. We might then say
that our river was navigable, - why not? In after-years I read in
print, with no little satisfaction, that it was thought by some
that, with a little expense in removing rocks and deepening the
channel, "there might be a profitable inland navigation." _I_
then lived some-where to tell of.
Such is Commerce, which shakes the cocoa-nut and bread-fruit tree
in the remotest isle, and sooner or later dawns on the duskiest
and most simple-minded savage. If we may be pardoned the
digression, who can help being affected at the thought of the
very fine and slight, but positive relation, in which the savage
inhabitants of some remote isle stand to the mysterious white
mariner, the child of the sun? - as if _we_ were to have dealings
with an animal higher in the scale of being than ourselves. It
is a barely recognized fact to the natives that he exists, and
has his home far away somewhere, and is glad to buy their fresh
fruits with his superfluous commodities. Under the same catholic
sun glances his white ship over Pacific waves into their smooth
bays, and the poor savage's paddle gleams in the air.
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