But We Did Not Tarry To Examine Them Minutely,
Making Haste To Get Past The Village Here Collected, And Out Of
Hearing Of The Hammer Which Was Laying The Foundation Of Another
Lowell On The Banks.
At the time of our voyage Manchester was a
village of about two thousand inhabitants, where we landed for a
moment to get some cool water, and where an inhabitant told us
that he was accustomed to go across the river into Goffstown for
his water.
But now, as I have been told, and indeed have
witnessed, it contains fourteen thousand inhabitants. From a
hill on the road between Goffstown and Hooksett, four miles
distant, I have seen a thunder-shower pass over, and the sun
break out and shine on a city there, where I had landed nine
years before in the fields; and there was waving the flag of its
Museum, where "the only perfect skeleton of a Greenland or river
whale in the United States" was to be seen, and I also read in
its directory of a "Manchester Athenaeum and Gallery of the Fine
Arts."
According to the Gazetteer, the descent of Amoskeag Falls, which
are the most considerable in the Merrimack, is fifty-four feet in
half a mile. We locked ourselves through here with much ado,
surmounting the successive watery steps of this river's staircase
in the midst of a crowd of villagers, jumping into the canal to
their amusement, to save our boat from upsetting, and consuming
much river-water in our service.
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