“I see the emerald woods prepare
       To shed their vestiture once more,
     And distant elm-trees spot the air
       With yellow pictures softly o’er.
          . . . . . 
     “No more the water-lily’s pride
       In milk-white circles swims content,
     No more the blue-weed’s clusters ride
       And mock the heavens’ element.
          . . . . . 
     “Autumn, thy wreath and mine are blent
       With the same colors, for to me
     A richer sky than all is lent,
       While fades my dream-like company.

     “Our skies glow purple, but the wind
       Sobs chill through green trees and bright graas,
     To-day shines fair, and lurk behind
       The times that into winter pass.

     “So fair we seem, so cold we are,
       So fast we hasten to decay,
     Yet through our night glows many a star,
       That still shall claim its sunny day.”

So sang a Concord poet once.

There is a peculiar interest belonging to the still later flowers, which abide with us the approach of winter.  There is something witch-like in the appearance of the witch-hazel, which blossoms late in October and in November, with its irregular and angular spray and petals like furies’ hair, or small ribbon streamers.  Its blossoming, too, at this irregular period, when other shrubs have lost their leaves, as well as blossoms, looks like witches’ craft.  Certainly it blooms in no garden of man’s.  There is a whole fairy-land on the hillside where it grows.

Some have thought that the gales do not at present waft to the voyager the natural and original fragrance of the land, such as the early navigators described, and that the loss of many odoriferous native plants, sweet-scented grasses and medicinal herbs, which formerly sweetened the atmosphere, and rendered it salubrious,—­by the grazing of cattle and the rooting of swine, is the source of many diseases which now prevail; the earth, say they, having been long subjected to extremely artificial and luxurious modes of cultivation, to gratify the appetite, converted into a stye and hot-bed, where men for profit increase the ordinary decay of nature.

According to the record of an old inhabitant of Tyngsborough, now dead, whose farm we were now gliding past, one of the greatest freshets on this river took place in October, 1785, and its height was marked by a nail driven into an apple-tree behind his house.  One of his descendants has shown this to me, and I judged it to be at least seventeen or eighteen feet above the level of the river at the time.  According to Barber, the river rose twenty-one feet above the common high-water mark, at Bradford in the year 1818.  Before the Lowell and Nashua railroad was built, the engineer made inquiries of the inhabitants along the banks as to how high they had known the river to rise.  When he came to this house he was conducted