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black, oozy banks. An old punt, half full of yellow water, is moored to a stake. Out in the fields you hear the hot click, click of a mowing machine, drowsier than a locust's song at summer noon. Men are near, no doubt horses, a road, perhaps a town. But you do not see them. You see only the old punt, the tall grasses on the bank, it may be the top of a far blue hill peeping over, and ahead the quiet waterway wandering again into the cool shadows of the maples. Those hay-fields might stretch to infinity for all you can say. Your view of the world is not comprehensive; it is the view of the worm rather than the bird. But how alluring is its strangeness, how restful its seclusion, between grassy banks under the dome of the summer sky. Even the ways of the worm may be pleasant, then-a fact worth finding out.

Presently there is a rustle in the grasses, and a small boy stands over you, staring down, a one-piece bamboo fish-pole towering in his hand. His body

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cuts against the sun, and, see, he has an aura in his hair!

Always there is this strangeness of the river way to give it perpetual allure. Do you meet with a fisherman sitting on the bank, it is his feet you see first. Always the bordering grasses are important, and how large the sky, how flat and restricted the plain when the banks sink down to give a glimpse of it! Passing under a bridge, the dust disturbed by a rumbling motor overhead shakes down upon you or tinkles on the water-sweetest of tiny sounds, this tinkle of dust on still water! It is as if you were in another world, below your human kind in space, but not, you are sure, in degree, so gently your craft

No mystery is quite like the mystery of a river

slips along amid the cloistered beauties of the stream.

"In the garden," writes Emerson in his "Journal," "the eye watches the flying cloud and Walden Woods, but turns from the village. Poor Society! what hast thou done to be the aversion of us all?" But need Society be our aversion because sometimes we turn from it in weariness to the contemplation of Walden Woods or the river way, or because our spirit recognizes in itself a primal kinship not alone with Society but with Solitude as well, with whispering waters and Joepye-weed and the tall grass that nods against the sky? "What do they know of England who only Eng

land know?"

bend, as no curve is quite so beautiful.-Page 36.

And what do we know of Society who know nothing of Solitude? He sees not the battle best who is in the brunt of it. He is not the master of his social relations whose every idea and action is born of human intercourse, because he is not the master of his own soul; he has ignored its relations to the primal and inanimate, its capacity for contemplation. "All great deeds," said Martineau," are born of solitude." It is in solitude that the thought matures. It is in the face of his origins that what is trivial in man is disclosed to his questioning spirit. Let him go and contemplate rivers, and be ashamed of the size of last Sunday's newspapers!

Forever a river "addresses the imagina

tion and the interrogating soul." The population of cities is a dull study to the boy, but the length of the Nile is poetry. Geography is a less interesting study to the child of to-day than it was to our fathers just in so far as the map of Africa has lost those delightful pink portions marked "unexplored," and the upper reaches of its rivers lost their dotted lines which indicated the Unknown. The boy is not greatly impressed by the size of the wheat crop of the United States, but what boy would not defend the size of the Mississippi against the world? A river comes from the Unknown, from the high hills and the forest, and it moves as irresistibly as a planet to the Unknown again, to the sea. It speaks forever the mystery of its origin and of its destination. Like a road, it calls perpetually to the imagination because it is going somewhere. But, unlike a road, there is no hint of man in its composition. It is the leader always. Man follows panting on its bank, and lays his roads where the river has been the primal engineer.

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We are all familiar with the river's calm and assured position in the centre of the picture. Whether it is the Rhine coming down through vine-terraced hills, or the magnificent Hudson sweeping out of the blue north into the view of those tenementtowered heights of upper Manhattan, or the Hoosatonic curling through the meadows of Stockbridge ringed by purple hills, or the sluggish Charles gay with canoes amid the lawns of Dedham, or the Wild Ammonoosuc chattering out from the forests of Moosilauke and fighting its way through rugged intervals to reach the Connecticut, the view is always composed around the

You rise before the sun is free of the valley fog embers.. -Page 36.

river, and no matter how high you climb to contemplate, widening your horizon, ever does that silver thread of water bind the landscape into a perfect whole.

build up the fire in last night's

So it is that man's roads winding by its banks, or his glittering steel rails following its curves, seem but to trail the primitive pioneer-as, indeed, is the fact-and where the river, with magnificent sweep and power, ploughs its way through the hills the glittering rails plunge after, with a kind

of joy of exploration, as if they cried: "We shall follow it and see what comes!" Small wonder the river dominates the imagination, and to the boy is the most delectable thing in geography. Even that brook behind his house somewhere joins the sea. He may launch a chip on its surface for a voyage of a thousand miles. What is the population of Algeria before such a living marvel as this?

When I was a boy our base-ball field was on the summit of an almost imperceptible divide. A spring at the southern end sent a diminutive trickle down through a meadow where white violets grew, into the discolored waters of the "town brook," and thence ultimately into the Saugus River. A second spring at the northern end sent

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a diminutive trickle through the muddy ooze of Duck Pond into the cranberry bog of Birch Meadow, and thence through three miles of white pine forest-now, alas! no more-into the long, forest-bordered reaches of the Hundred Acre meadows, where the Ipswich River wound its sinuous way, with sluggish bottoms where the hornpout bit and gravel pools where we swam. I can remember as it were yesterday the day when I studied in my geography about

a divide, and realized with a thrill of joy that Kingman's field was such a thing. I raced home from school. I ran first to the southern spring, then to the northern, and told myself that each was the headwater of a river! It was my hour to stand "silent upon a peak in Darien." My childish imagination followed those trickles in the grass till my body was borne in a great boat on their mighty waters and my ears heard the sound of the sea. Geography for me had suddenly become alive, tingling -had suddenly become poetry. I waited with burning impatience for Saturday, to follow my northward running brook, muddy and torn and scratched, through the bogs and the pine woods, till it joined the Ipswich. And then I stood on a tuft of grass in the

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The great trees on the bank behind you rise ethereal, phantom shadows against the

swampy bottom where the two streams met and yearned for a craft to carry me down the larger body past grandfather's mill, past unknown towns, till the water tasted of the salt and the breakers boomed.

Since that far-off day, I have stood by a spring, bubbling from under a bowlder, and watched the thread of crystal water slip through the mosses into the depths of a mountain ravine, while tall peaks towered about me-slip away on its journey

ochre dawn.-Page 36.

of a thousand miles to the sea. I have been at the high head of a river monarch. But I was less thrilled than the day when I first conceived that Kingman's field was a divide. Since that day, too, I have launched a boat on many rivers, but never with quite the expectant joy which attended the launching of the Crusader, for that long-dreamedof trip down the Ipswich.

The Crusader was made at home (for every home in those days was a manual

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