But alas! of the crippled Indians, and their adventures in the woods,—­

     “For as we are informed, so thick and fast they fell,
     Scarce twenty of their number at night did get home well,”—­

how many balls lodged with them, how fared their cranberries, what Berwick or Saco they got into, and finally what pension or township was granted them, there is no journal to tell.

It is stated in the History of Dunstable, that just before his last march, Lovewell was warned to beware of the ambuscades of the enemy, but “he replied, `that he did not care for them,’ and bending down a small elm beside which he was standing into a bow, declared `that he would treat the Indians in the same way.’  This elm is still standing [in Nashua], a venerable and magnificent tree.”

Meanwhile, having passed the Horseshoe Interval in Tyngsborough, where the river makes a sudden bend to the northwest,—­for our reflections have anticipated our progress somewhat,—­we were advancing farther into the country and into the day, which last proved almost as golden as the preceding, though the slight bustle and activity of the Monday seemed to penetrate even to this scenery.  Now and then we had to muster all our energy to get round a point, where the river broke rippling over rocks, and the maples trailed their branches in the stream, but there was generally a backwater or eddy on the side, of which we took advantage.  The river was here about forty rods wide and fifteen feet deep.  Occasionally one ran along the shore, examining the country, and visiting the nearest farm-houses, while the other followed the windings of the stream alone, to meet his companion at some distant point, and hear the report of his adventures; how the farmer praised the coolness of his well, and his wife offered the stranger a draught of milk, or the children quarrelled for the only transparency in the window that they might get sight of the man at the well.  For though the country seemed so new, and no house was observed by us, shut in between the banks that sunny day, we did not have to travel far to find where men inhabited, like wild bees, and had sunk wells in the loose sand and loam of the Merrimack.  There dwelt the subject of the Hebrew scriptures, and the Esprit des Lois, where a thin vaporous smoke curled up through the noon.  All that is told of mankind, of the inhabitants of the Upper Nile, and the Sunderbunds, and Timbuctoo, and the Orinoko, was experience here.  Every race and class of men was represented.  According to Belknap, the historian of New Hampshire, who wrote sixty years ago, here too, perchance, dwelt “new lights,” and free thinking men even then.  “The people in general throughout the State,” it is written, “are professors of the Christian religion in some form or other.  There is, however, a sort of wise men who pretend to reject it; but they have not yet been able to substitute a better in its place.”