thy suspense, but still brave, indifferent, on easy fin there, like shad reserved for higher destinies.  Willing to be decimated for man’s behoof after the spawning season.  Away with the superficial and selfish phil-anthropy of men,—­who knows what admirable virtue of fishes may be below low-water-mark, bearing up against a hard destiny, not admired by that fellow-creature who alone can appreciate it!  Who hears the fishes when they cry?  It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries.  Thou shalt erelong have thy way up the rivers, up all the rivers of the globe, if I am not mistaken.  Yea, even thy dull watery dream shall be more than realized.  If it were not so, but thou wert to be overlooked at first and at last, then would not I take their heaven.  Yes, I say so, who think I know better than thou canst.  Keep a stiff fin then, and stem all the tides thou mayst meet.

At length it would seem that the interests, not of the fishes only, but of the men of Wayland, of Sudbury, of Concord, demand the levelling of that dam.  Innumerable acres of meadow are waiting to be made dry land, wild native grass to give place to English.  The farmers stand with scythes whet, waiting the subsiding of the waters, by gravitation, by evaporation or otherwise, but sometimes their eyes do not rest, their wheels do not roll, on the quaking meadow ground during the haying season at all.  So many sources of wealth inaccessible.  They rate the loss hereby incurred in the single town of Wayland alone as equal to the expense of keeping a hundred yoke of oxen the year round.  One year, as I learn, not long ago, the farmers standing ready to drive their teams afield as usual, the water gave no signs of falling; without new attraction in the heavens, without freshet or visible cause, still standing stagnant at an unprecedented height.  All hydrometers were at fault; some trembled for their English even.  But speedy emissaries revealed the unnatural secret, in the new float-board, wholly a foot in width, added to their already too high privileges by the dam proprietors.  The hundred yoke of oxen, meanwhile, standing patient, gazing wishfully meadowward, at that inaccessible waving native grass, uncut but by the great mower Time, who cuts so broad a swathe, without so much as a wisp to wind about their horns.

That was a long pull from Ball’s Hill to Carlisle Bridge, sitting with our faces to the south, a slight breeze rising from the north, but nevertheless water still runs and grass grows, for now, having passed the bridge between Carlisle and Bedford, we see men haying far off in the meadow, their heads waving like the grass which they cut.  In the distance the wind seemed to bend all alike.  As the night stole over, such a freshness was wafted across the meadow that every blade of cut grass seemed to teem with life.  Faint purple clouds began to be reflected in the water, and the cow-bells tinkled louder along the banks, while, like sly water-rats, we stole along nearer the shore, looking for a place to pitch our camp.