morning till night, unless the wind is so fair that his single sail will suffice without other labor than steering, the boatman walks backwards and forwards on the side of his boat, now stooping with his shoulder to the pole, then drawing it back slowly to set it again, meanwhile moving steadily forward through an endless valley and an everchanging scenery, now distinguishing his course for a mile or two, and now shut in by a sudden turn of the river in a small woodland lake.  All the phenomena which surround him are simple and grand, and there is something impressive, even majestic, in the very motion he causes, which will naturally be communicated to his own character, and he feels the slow, irresistible movement under him with pride, as if it were his own energy.

The news spread like wildfire among us youths, when formerly, once in a year or two, one of these boats came up the Concord River, and was seen stealing mysteriously through the meadows and past the village.  It came and departed as silently as a cloud, without noise or dust, and was witnessed by few.  One summer day this huge traveller might be seen moored at some meadow’s wharf, and another summer day it was not there.  Where precisely it came from, or who these men were who knew the rocks and soundings better than we who bathed there, we could never tell.  We knew some river’s bay only, but they took rivers from end to end.  They were a sort of fabulous river-men to us.  It was inconceivable by what sort of mediation any mere landsman could hold communication with them.  Would they heave to, to gratify his wishes?  No, it was favor enough to know faintly of their destination, or the time of their possible return.  I have seen them in the summer when the stream ran low, mowing the weeds in mid-channel, and with hayers’ jests cutting broad swaths in three feet of water, that they might make a passage for their scow, while the grass in long windrows was carried down the stream, undried by the rarest hay-weather.  We admired unweariedly how their vessel would float, like a huge chip, sustaining so many casks of lime, and thousands of bricks, and such heaps of iron ore, with wheelbarrows aboard, and that, when we stepped on it, it did not yield to the pressure of our feet.  It gave us confidence in the prevalence of the law of buoyancy, and we imagined to what infinite uses it might be put.  The men appeared to lead a kind of life on it, and it was whispered that they slept aboard.  Some affirmed that it carried sail, and that such winds blew here as filled the sails of vessels on the ocean; which again others much doubted.  They had been seen to sail across our Fair Haven bay by lucky fishers who were out, but unfortunately others were not there to see.  We might then say that our river was navigable,—­why not?  In after-years I read in print, with no little satisfaction, that it was thought by some that, with a little expense in removing rocks and deepening the channel, “there might be a profitable inland navigation.” I then lived some-where to tell of.