Its Leaves Are In
Some Countries Given To Cattle, A Kind Of Chocolate Has Been Made
Of Its Fruit, A Medicine Has Been Prepared From An Infusion Of
Its Flowers, And Finally, The Charcoal Made Of Its Wood Is
Greatly Valued For Gunpowder.
The sight of this tree reminded us that we had reached a strange
land to us.
As we sailed under this canopy of leaves we saw the
sky through its chinks, and, as it were, the meaning and idea of
the tree stamped in a thousand hieroglyphics on the heavens. The
universe is so aptly fitted to our organization that the eye
wanders and reposes at the same time. On every side there is
something to soothe and refresh this sense. Look up at the
tree-tops and see how finely Nature finishes off her work there.
See how the pines spire without end higher and higher, and make a
graceful fringe to the earth. And who shall count the finer
cobwebs that soar and float away from their utmost tops, and the
myriad insects that dodge between them. Leaves are of more
various forms than the alphabets of all languages put together;
of the oaks alone there are hardly two alike, and each expresses
its own character.
In all her products Nature only develops her simplest germs. One
would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create
birds. The hawk, which now takes his flight over the top of the
wood, was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its
aisles. From rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to
the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird.
Salmon Brook comes in from the west under the railroad, a mile
and a half below the village of Nashua. We rowed up far enough
into the meadows which border it to learn its piscatorial history
from a haymaker on its banks. He told us that the silver eel was
formerly abundant here, and pointed to some sunken creels at its
mouth. This man's memory and imagination were fertile in
fishermen's tales of floating isles in bottomless ponds, and of
lakes mysteriously stocked with fishes, and would have kept us
till nightfall to listen, but we could not afford to loiter in
this roadstead, and so stood out to our sea again. Though we
never trod in those meadows, but only touched their margin with
our hands, we still retain a pleasant memory of them.
Salmon Brook, whose name is said to be a translation from the
Indian, was a favorite haunt of the aborigines. Here, too, the
first white settlers of Nashua planted, and some dents in the
earth where their houses stood and the wrecks of ancient
apple-trees are still visible. About one mile up this stream
stood the house of old John Lovewell, who was an ensign in the
army of Oliver Cromwell, and the father of "famous Captain
Lovewell." He settled here before 1690, and died about 1754, at
the age of one hundred and twenty years. He is thought to have
been engaged in the famous Narragansett swamp fight, which took
place in 1675, before he came here. The Indians are said to have
spared him in succeeding wars on account of his kindness to them.
Even in 1700 he was so old and gray-headed that his scalp was
worth nothing, since the French Governor offered no bounty for
such. I have stood in the dent of his cellar on the bank of the
brook, and talked there with one whose grandfather had, whose
father might have, talked with Lovewell. Here also he had a mill
in his old age, and kept a small store. He was remembered by
some who were recently living, as a hale old man who drove the
boys out of his orchard with his cane. Consider the triumphs of
the mortal man, and what poor trophies it would have to show, to
wit: - He cobbled shoes without glasses at a hundred, and cut a
handsome swath at a hundred and five! Lovewell's house is said
to have been the first which Mrs. Dustan reached on her escape
from the Indians. Here probably the hero of Pequawket was born
and bred. Close by may be seen the cellar and the gravestone of
Joseph Hassell, who, as is elsewhere recorded, with his wife
Anna, and son Benjamin, and Mary Marks, "were slain by our Indian
enemies on September 2d, [1691,] in the evening." As Gookin
observed on a previous occasion, "The Indian rod upon the English
backs had not yet done God's errand." Salmon Brook near its mouth
is still a solitary stream, meandering through woods and meadows,
while the then uninhabited mouth of the Nashua now resounds with
the din of a manufacturing town.
A stream from Otternic Pond in Hudson comes in just above Salmon
Brook, on the opposite side. There was a good view of Uncannunuc,
the most conspicuous mountain in these parts, from the bank here,
seen rising over the west end of the bridge above. We soon after
passed the village of Nashua, on the river of the same name,
where there is a covered bridge over the Merrimack. The Nashua,
which is one of the largest tributaries, flows from Wachusett
Mountain, through Lancaster, Groton, and other towns, where it
has formed well-known elm-shaded meadows, but near its mouth it
is obstructed by falls and factories, and did not tempt us to
explore it.
Far away from here, in Lancaster, with another companion, I have
crossed the broad valley of the Nashua, over which we had so long
looked westward from the Concord hills without seeing it to the
blue mountains in the horizon. So many streams, so many meadows
and woods and quiet dwellings of men had lain concealed between
us and those Delectable Mountains; - from yonder hill on the road
to Tyngsborough you may get a good view of them. There where it
seemed uninterrupted forest to our youthful eyes, between two
neighboring pines in the horizon, lay the valley of the Nashua,
and this very stream was even then winding at its bottom, and
then, as now, it was here silently mingling its waters with the
Merrimack.
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