Thalesian school, and no doubt believes in the priority of water to the other elements; the relic of a twilight antediluvian age which yet inhabits these bright American rivers with us Yankees.  There is something venerable in this melancholy and contemplative race of birds, which may have trodden the earth while it was yet in a slimy and imperfect state.  Perchance their tracks too are still visible on the stones.  It still lingers into our glaring summers, bravely supporting its fate without sympathy from man, as if it looked forward to some second advent of which he has no assurance.  One wonders if, by its patient study by rocks and sandy capes, it has wrested the whole of her secret from Nature yet.  What a rich experience it must have gained, standing on one leg and looking out from its dull eye so long on sunshine and rain, moon and stars!  What could it tell of stagnant pools and reeds and dank night-fogs!  It would be worth the while to look closely into the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours, and in such solitudes, its dull, yellowish, greenish eye.  Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.  I have seen these birds stand by the half-dozen together in the shallower water along the shore, with their bills thrust into the mud at the bottom, probing for food, the whole head being concealed, while the neck and body formed an arch above the water.

Cohass Brook, the outlet of Massabesic Pond,—­which last is five or six miles distant, and contains fifteen hundred acres, being the largest body of fresh water in Rockingham County,—­comes in near here from the east.  Rowing between Manchester and Bedford, we passed, at an early hour, a ferry and some falls, called Goff’s Falls, the Indian Cohasset, where there is a small village, and a handsome green islet in the middle of the stream.  From Bedford and Merrimack have been boated the bricks of which Lowell is made.  About twenty years before, as they told us, one Moore, of Bedford, having clay on his farm, contracted to furnish eight millions of bricks to the founders of that city within two years.  He fulfilled his contract in one year, and since then bricks have been the principal export from these towns.  The farmers found thus a market for their wood, and when they had brought a load to the kilns, they could cart a load of bricks to the shore, and so make a profitable day’s work of it.  Thus all parties were benefited.  It was worth the while to see the place where Lowell was “dug out.”  So likewise Manchester is being built of bricks made still higher up the river at Hooksett.

There might be seen here on the bank of the Merrimack, near Goff’s Falls, in what is now the town of Bedford, famous “for hops and for its fine domestic manufactures,” some graves of the aborigines.  The land still bears this scar here, and time is slowly crumbling the bones of a race.  Yet, without fail, every spring, since they first fished and hunted here, the brown thrasher has heralded the morning from a birch or alder spray, and the undying race of reed-birds still rustles through the withering grass.  But these bones rustle not.  These mouldering elements are slowly preparing for another metamorphosis, to serve new masters, and what was the Indian’s will erelong be the white man’s sinew.