There Dwelt Along At Considerable Distances On This
Interval A Quiet Agricultural And Pastoral People, With Every
House Its Well, As We Sometimes Proved, And Every Household,
Though Never So Still And Remote It Appeared In The Noontide, Its
Dinner About These Times.
There they lived on, those New England
people, farmer lives, father and grandfather and great-grandfather,
on and on
Without noise, keeping up tradition, and expecting,
beside fair weather and abundant harvests, we did not learn what.
They were contented to live, since it was so contrived for them,
and where their lines had fallen.
Our uninquiring corpses lie more low
Than our life's curiosity doth go.
Yet these men had no need to travel to be as wise as Solomon in
all his glory, so similar are the lives of men in all countries,
and fraught with the same homely experiences. One half the world
_knows_ how the other half lives.
About noon we passed a small village in Merrimack at Thornton's
Ferry, and tasted of the waters of Naticook Brook on the same
side, where French and his companions, whose grave we saw in
Dunstable, were ambuscaded by the Indians. The humble village of
Litchfield, with its steepleless meeting-house, stood on the
opposite or east bank, near where a dense grove of willows
backed by maples skirted the shore. There also we noticed some
shagbark-trees, which, as they do not grow in Concord, were as
strange a sight to us as the palm would be, whose fruit only we
have seen. Our course now curved gracefully to the north,
leaving a low, flat shore on the Merrimack side, which forms a
sort of harbor for canal-boats. We observed some fair elms
and particularly large and handsome white-maples standing
conspicuously on this interval; and the opposite shore, a quarter
of a mile below, was covered with young elms and maples six
inches high, which had probably sprung from the seeds which had
been washed across.
Some carpenters were at work here mending a scow on the green and
sloping bank. The strokes of their mallets echoed from shore to
shore, and up and down the river, and their tools gleamed in the
sun a quarter of a mile from us, and we realized that boat-building
was as ancient and honorable an art as agriculture, and that
there might be a naval as well as a pastoral life. The whole
history of commerce was made manifest in that scow turned bottom
upward on the shore. Thus did men begin to go down upon the sea
in ships; _quaeque diu steterant in montibus altis, Fluctibus
ignotis insultavere carinae;_ "and keels which had long stood on
high mountains careered insultingly (_insultavere_) over unknown
waves." (Ovid, Met. I. 133.) We thought that it would be well
for the traveller to build his boat on the bank of a stream,
instead of finding a ferry or a bridge. In the Adventures of
Henry the fur-trader, it is pleasant to read that when with his
Indians he reached the shore of Ontario, they consumed two days
in making two canoes of the bark of the elm-tree, in which to
transport themselves to Fort Niagara.
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