deer and bear.  He set up a mill, and fields of English grain sprang in the virgin soil.  And with his grain he scattered the seeds of the dandelion and the wild trefoil over the meadows, mingling his English flowers with the wild native ones.  The bristling burdock, the sweet-scented catnip, and the humble yarrow planted themselves along his woodland road, they too seeking “freedom to worship God” in their way.  And thus he plants a town.  The white man’s mullein soon reigned in Indian cornfields, and sweet-scented English grasses clothed the new soil.  Where, then, could the Red Man set his foot?  The honey-bee hummed through the Massachusetts woods, and sipped the wild-flowers round the Indian’s wigwam, perchance unnoticed, when, with prophetic warning, it stung the Red child’s hand, forerunner of that industrious tribe that was to come and pluck the wild-flower of his race up by the root.

The white man comes, pale as the dawn, with a load of thought, with a slumbering intelligence as a fire raked up, knowing well what he knows, not guessing but calculating; strong in community, yielding obedience to authority; of experienced race; of wonderful, wonderful common sense; dull but capable, slow but persevering, severe but just, of little humor but genuine; a laboring man, despising game and sport; building a house that endures, a framed house.  He buys the Indian’s moccasins and baskets, then buys his hunting-grounds, and at length forgets where he is buried and ploughs up his bones.  And here town records, old, tattered, time-worn, weather-stained chronicles, contain the Indian sachem’s mark perchance, an arrow or a beaver, and the few fatal words by which he deeded his hunting-grounds away.  He comes with a list of ancient Saxon, Norman, and Celtic names, and strews them up and down this river,—­Framingham, Sudbury, Bedford, Carlisle, Billerica, Chelmsford,—­and this is New Angle-land, and these are the New West Saxons whom the Red Men call, not Angle-ish or English, but Yengeese, and so at last they are known for Yankees.

When we were opposite to the middle of Billerica, the fields on either hand had a soft and cultivated English aspect, the village spire being seen over the copses which skirt the river, and sometimes an orchard straggled down to the water-side, though, generally, our course this forenoon was the wildest part of our voyage.  It seemed that men led a quiet and very civil life there.  The inhabitants were plainly cultivators of the earth, and lived under an organized political government.  The school-house stood with a meek aspect, entreating a long truce to war and savage life.  Every one finds by his own experience, as well as in history, that the era in which men cultivate the apple, and the amenities of the garden, is essentially different from that of the hunter and forest life, and neither can displace the other without loss.  We have all had our day-dreams, as well as more prophetic nocturnal vision; but as