The sun lodged on the old gray cliffs, and glanced from every pad; the bulrushes and flags seemed to rejoice in the delicious light and air; the meadows were a-drinking at their leisure; the frogs sat meditating, all sabbath thoughts, summing up their week, with one eye out on the golden sun, and one toe upon a reed, eying the wondrous universe in which they act their part; the fishes swam more staid and soberly, as maidens go to church; shoals of golden and silver minnows rose to the surface to behold the heavens, and then sheered off into more sombre aisles; they swept by as if moved by one mind, continually gliding past each other, and yet preserving the form of their battalion unchanged, as if they were still embraced by the transparent membrane which held the spawn; a young band of brethren and sisters trying their new fins; now they wheeled, now shot ahead, and when we drove them to the shore and cut them off, they dexterously tacked and passed underneath the boat.  Over the old wooden bridges no traveller crossed, and neither the river nor the fishes avoided to glide between the abutments.

Here was a village not far off behind the woods, Billerica, settled not long ago, and the children still bear the names of the first settlers in this late “howling wilderness”; yet to all intents and purposes it is as old as Fernay or as Mantua, an old gray town where men grow old and sleep already under moss-grown monuments,—­outgrow their usefulness.  This is ancient Billerica, (Villarica?) now in its dotage, named from the English Billericay, and whose Indian name was Shawshine.  I never heard that it was young.  See, is not nature here gone to decay, farms all run out, meeting-house grown gray and racked with age?  If you would know of its early youth, ask those old gray rocks in the pasture.  It has a bell that sounds sometimes as far as Concord woods; I have heard that,—­ay, hear it now.  No wonder that such a sound startled the dreaming Indian, and frightened his game, when the first bells were swung on trees, and sounded through the forest beyond the plantations of the white man.  But to-day I like best the echo amid these cliffs and woods.  It is no feeble imitation, but rather its original, or as if some rural Orpheus played over the strain again to show how it should sound.

   Dong, sounds the brass in the east,
   As if to a funeral feast,
   But I like that sound the best
   Out of the fluttering west.

   The steeple ringeth a knell,
   But the fairies’ silvery bell
   Is the voice of that gentle folk,
   Or else the horizon that spoke.

   Its metal is not of brass,
   But air, and water, and glass,
   And under a cloud it is swung,
   And by the wind it is rung.

   When the steeple tolleth the noon,
   It soundeth not so soon,
   Yet it rings a far earlier hour,
   And the sun has not reached its tower.