But We Still Remember The
Gnarled And Hospitable Oaks Which Grew Even There For Our
Entertainment, And Were No Strangers
To us, the lonely horse in
his pasture, and the patient cows, whose path to the river, so
judiciously chosen
To overcome the difficulties of the way, we
followed, and disturbed their ruminations in the shade; and,
above all, the cool, free aspect of the wild apple-trees,
generously proffering their fruit to us, though still green and
crude, - the hard, round, glossy fruit, which, if not ripe, still
was not poison, but New-English too, brought hither its ancestors
by ours once. These gentler trees imparted a half-civilized and
twilight aspect to the otherwise barbarian land. Still farther
on we scrambled up the rocky channel of a brook, which had long
served nature for a sluice there, leaping like it from rock to
rock through tangled woods, at the bottom of a ravine, which grew
darker and darker, and more and more hoarse the murmurs of the
stream, until we reached the ruins of a mill, where now the ivy
grew, and the trout glanced through the crumbling flume; and
there we imagined what had been the dreams and speculations of
some early settler. But the waning day compelled us to embark
once more, and redeem this wasted time with long and vigorous
sweeps over the rippling stream.
It was still wild and solitary, except that at intervals of a
mile or two the roof of a cottage might be seen over the bank.
This region, as we read, was once famous for the manufacture of
straw bonnets of the Leghorn kind, of which it claims the
invention in these parts; and occasionally some industrious
damsel tripped down to the water's edge, to put her straw a-soak,
as it appeared, and stood awhile to watch the retreating
voyageurs, and catch the fragment of a boat-song which we had
made, wafted over the water.
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