part, an author consults only with all who have written before him upon a subject, and his book is but the advice of so many.  But a good book will never have been forestalled, but the topic itself will in one sense be new, and its author, by consulting with nature, will consult not only with those who have gone before, but with those who may come after.  There is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first.

We thus worked our way up this river, gradually adjusting our thoughts to novelties, beholding from its placid bosom a new nature and new works of men, and, as it were with increasing confidence, finding nature still habitable, genial, and propitious to us; not following any beaten path, but the windings of the river, as ever the nearest way for us.  Fortunately we had no business in this country.  The Concord had rarely been a river, or rivus, but barely fluvius, or between fluvius and lacus.  This Merrimack was neither rivus nor fluvius nor lacus, but rather amnis here, a gently swelling and stately rolling flood approaching the sea.  We could even sympathize with its buoyant tide, going to seek its fortune in the ocean, and, anticipating the time when “being received within the plain of its freer water,” it should “beat the shores for banks,”—­

   “campoque recepta
   Liberioris aquae, pro ripis litora pulsant.”

At length we doubled a low shrubby islet, called Rabbit Island, subjected alternately to the sun and to the waves, as desolate as if it lay some leagues within the icy sea, and found ourselves in a narrower part of the river, near the sheds and yards for picking the stone known as the Chelmsford granite, which is quarried in Westford and the neighboring towns.  We passed Wicasuck Island, which contains seventy acres or more, on our right, between Chelmsford and Tyngsborough.  This was a favorite residence of the Indians.  According to the History of Dunstable, “About 1663, the eldest son of Passaconaway [Chief of the Penacooks] was thrown into jail for a debt of (pounds)45, due to John Tinker, by one of his tribe, and which he had promised verbally should be paid.  To relieve him from his imprisonment, his brother Wannalancet and others, who owned Wicasuck Island, sold it and paid the debt.”  It was, however, restored to the Indians by the General Court in 1665.  After the departure of the Indians in 1683, it was granted to Jonathan Tyng in payment for his services to the colony, in maintaining a garrison at his house.  Tyng’s house stood not far from Wicasuck Falls.  Gookin, who, in his Epistle Dedicatory to Robert Boyle, apologizes for presenting his “matter clothed in a wilderness dress,” says that on the breaking out of Philip’s war in 1675, there were taken up by the Christian Indians and the English in Marlborough, and sent to Cambridge, seven “Indians