Standing At Its Mouth, Look Up Its Sparkling
Stream To Its Source, - A Silver Cascade Which Falls All The Way
From The White Mountains To The Sea, - And Behold A City On Each
Successive Plateau, A Busy Colony Of Human Beaver Around Every
Fall.
Not to mention Newburyport and Haverhill, see Lawrence,
and Lowell, and Nashua, and Manchester, and Concord, gleaming one
above the other.
When at length it has escaped from under the
last of the factories, it has a level and unmolested passage to
the sea, a mere _waste water_, as it were, bearing little with it
but its fame; its pleasant course revealed by the morning fog
which hangs over it, and the sails of the few small vessels which
transact the commerce of Haverhill and Newburyport. But its real
vessels are railroad cars, and its true and main stream, flowing
by an iron channel farther south, may be traced by a long line of
vapor amid the hills, which no morning wind ever disperses, to
where it empties into the sea at Boston. This side is the louder
murmur now. Instead of the scream of a fish-hawk scaring the
fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a
country to its progress.
This river too was at length discovered by the white man,
"trending up into the land," he knew not how far, possibly an
inlet to the South Sea. Its valley, as far as the Winnipiseogee,
was first surveyed in 1652. The first settlers of Massachusetts
supposed that the Connecticut, in one part of its course, ran
northwest, "so near the great lake as the Indians do pass their
canoes into it over land." From which lake and the "hideous
swamps" about it, as they supposed, came all the beaver that was
traded between Virginia and Canada, - and the Potomac was thought
to come out of or from very near it.
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