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.
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