Salmon Brook, whose name is said to be a translation from the Indian, was a favorite haunt of the aborigines.  Here, too, the first white settlers of Nashua planted, and some dents in the earth where their houses stood and the wrecks of ancient apple-trees are still visible.  About one mile up this stream stood the house of old John Lovewell, who was an ensign in the army of Oliver Cromwell, and the father of “famous Captain Lovewell.”  He settled here before 1690, and died about 1754, at the age of one hundred and twenty years.  He is thought to have been engaged in the famous Narragansett swamp fight, which took place in 1675, before he came here.  The Indians are said to have spared him in succeeding wars on account of his kindness to them.  Even in 1700 he was so old and gray-headed that his scalp was worth nothing, since the French Governor offered no bounty for such.  I have stood in the dent of his cellar on the bank of the brook, and talked there with one whose grandfather had, whose father might have, talked with Lovewell.  Here also he had a mill in his old age, and kept a small store.  He was remembered by some who were recently living, as a hale old man who drove the boys out of his orchard with his cane.  Consider the triumphs of the mortal man, and what poor trophies it would have to show, to wit:—­He cobbled shoes without glasses at a hundred, and cut a handsome swath at a hundred and five!  Lovewell’s house is said to have been the first which Mrs. Dustan reached on her escape from the Indians.  Here probably the hero of Pequawket was born and bred.  Close by may be seen the cellar and the gravestone of Joseph Hassell, who, as is elsewhere recorded, with his wife Anna, and son Benjamin, and Mary Marks, “were slain by our Indian enemies on September 2d, [1691,] in the evening.”  As Gookin observed on a previous occasion, “The Indian rod upon the English backs had not yet done God’s errand.”  Salmon Brook near its mouth is still a solitary stream, meandering through woods and meadows, while the then uninhabited mouth of the Nashua now resounds with the din of a manufacturing town.

A stream from Otternic Pond in Hudson comes in just above Salmon Brook, on the opposite side.  There was a good view of Uncannunuc, the most conspicuous mountain in these parts, from the bank here, seen rising over the west end of the bridge above.  We soon after passed the village of Nashua, on the river of the same name, where there is a covered bridge over the Merrimack.  The Nashua, which is one of the largest tributaries, flows from Wachusett Mountain, through Lancaster, Groton, and other towns, where it has formed well-known elm-shaded meadows, but near its mouth it is obstructed by falls and factories, and did not tempt us to explore it.