a picture of our friend, and require the removal of the softening and unifying air. I would as soon wish him skinned. A great painter, on the other hand, would invest S with his third integument, or exocarp of relations to things unseen and supersensuous. So, without intending it, our philosopher illustrated in his proper person the opportunities and the capabilities of modern

art.

The Concord is just broad and deep enough to afford plenty of sea-room to inexperienced navigators. We became such valiant oarsmen that M- who had had canoe-practice in the Northwest, undertook to "shoot" the boat between the close rows of piles that sustain the trestle-work of the railroad-bridge, and came through triumphant. We had the conceit taken out of us, however, the first time we ascended the Assabet, or north fork of the Concord. This is not quite so Quakerish in its habits and appearance as the other river. It is full of rocks, islands, shallows, sand-bars, grass-beds, and fallen trees. It is, accordingly, much frequented by the young ladies of the village for the purpose of sketching. Their boats, half drawn up on the bank in the shade of some group of oaks or chestnuts, add to the dangers of the route. Ours, which showed an extremely affectionate disposition to rub noses with every rock and rush into the green embraces of every tuft of watergrass, was constantly running foul of them. The stream is likewise a favorite haunt of the kingfisher. He sits on the mud-encrusted rotten limb of a submerged tree and watches the water gliding past, absorbed, no doubt, in that gentle revery which all fishers say is induced by their occupation and is one of its chief attractions. Heaps of freshwater mussel-shells left along the margin of the miniature beaches betrayed the presence of the otter, who seems to be a confirmed pot-hunter, not open to the gentler influences of the craft. One more habitué of the Assabet we found, a mud-turtle,-more mud than turtle, -who, like us, had drifted ashore on a stony point about two miles from the

mouth of the river. I could not believe in such an earthy creature. With a jack-knife we scraped off layer after layer of mud without even coming to his shell: so that, afraid we might scoop the life and soul out of the beast, we desisted, and threw him into the water, when he went to the bottom like a stone.

We had been obliged to make some remonstrances to our landlord about the more than Spartan simplicity of our fare. One morning, on coming down to breakfast, we found scated at the table before us a specimen of that peculiar genus which is sometimes supposed to belong only to the Bowery stage,―viz., the "low-down" Yankee. He was as dirty and as careless of outside appearance as our mud-turtle. He was not merely unwashed, but unwashable. His dusty-brown hair seemed to have gone unkempt for a fortnight. It would be useless to attempt to reproduce his dialect, which seemed to be in no small measure original with himself. He kept a "hotel," he informed us, some distance off in the country, and had made a bet that morning with one of his boarders that he would come, as he was, to town, and be well received by his friend Seth, our landlord. Seth was astonished, he let us know (as well he might be), but Seth was a right-down good fellow, and would not go back on a friend, if he did happen to cut a strange figure. On the contrary, he had asked him to breakfast, which, as he had started away from home, on the spur of the moment, fasting as well as hatless and coatless, was manifestly the friendliest thing that Seth could have done. From this the transition was easy to a rather extravagant eulogy of the meal, for, notwithstanding his starving condition and his long and early walk, he talked rather more than he ate. was one thing, however, that he blamed Seth for: he did not keep his knives sharp enough. "They did not do justice to the tenderness of the steak." "Why, sir," he said, turning to M"the other day I ran out of fresh meat and killed my old ox,-pretty near one age with myself; he was tough, sir,

There

tough as his own hide, right through to the bone. I was rather scared that he might be jest a leetle trifle too tough for my boarders. But I jest sharpened up every knife in the house ontil they cut like razors, and they swore they never ate primer beef in their lives. They thought I was getting extravagant, and bound to take a short road to bankruptcy, and, to keep me in the humor, they have been treating me ever since. Yes, Seth ought to keep that grindstone on a twist, he ought. "Twould save him a mint of money.'

The Assabet joins the Concord at a point just above a little red-painted wooden bridge, which is the principal means of communication between the town and the opposite bank. Our boating-excursions brought us below this bridge only once or twice to the famous battle field and Hawthorne's "Old Manse." Another bridge here crosses the stream, connecting the area around the monument with a long avenue of cedars forming part of the old Boston highway, where the first British soldiers fell. They are buried under, the rough stone wall which fences off the grounds of the Manse. An old tame raven hops gravely from stone to stone or whets his bayonet-like beak upon them. The Manse must have suited Hawthorne like an old coat. Heaven knows from what odd ends of the earth its materials have been swept together by a whisk of a witch's besom. Its gaunt ash-trees, its snowberry-bushes, the two granite monoliths flanking the gate, seem to bar the entrance of any orthodox Christian thought or sentiment. Those must have been strange sermons that were concocted within it. The artist Darley was staying there. He was out every morning before the fog had lifted from the meadows, fishing, shooting, or sketching.

The fogs thickened evening after evening and morning after morning during our stay, overflowing all the level meadow-land, as if marking out the limits of the coming autumnal inundation. M- was making a drawing of the valley from a high hill between

the two rivers. In the evening, looking toward sunset, fold upon fold of fog lay between the hills, marking the windings of both the streams for many miles.

After spending some days in Amesbury and getting tired of inland Massachusetts, I determined to go to Newburyport and ask M to meet me there and rejoice our eyes with a look at the sea. It is a long ride from Amesbury to Newburyport, and before I had got half-way it was raining in torrents. The water poured in unbroken sheets off the roof of the car. The wind drove the rain in through the slightest crevices; it dripped upon us from above; passengers put up their umbrellas. Two men, shining and flowing wet, got in at a turn of the road and made things still more uncomfortable. The horses went splash, splash, fetlock-deep in running water. We crossed over the Merrimac by a complication of wooden bridges. There was an ordinary stationary bridge, a covered bridge, and two draw-bridges. The yellow tide was pitted into opacity by rain-drops. At last we reached Newburyport. The car stopped within four or five blocks of the hotel, and that distance had to be walked. It might as well have been four or five miles. I had hardly made a step forward before I was completely incorporated with the elements and felt like a rain-drift with a gust of wind for a soul.

M, who had arrived before the storm reached its height, was taking care of the office fire while waiting for one to be built in the room he had ordered for us both. As soon as I had had dinner, we took possession of that. The room was a large one, situated in a corner of the building, the walls covered with a paper of a staring blue and drab rococo pattern. There was one window, looking upon the slate roof of a shed, down which a torrent was dashing from a badly-arranged spout. Some tall elms, barely discernible in the darkness, were toughening their fibres and parting with their ripened leaves in the gale. M had heard that there were some vessels outside the harbor bar afraid to venture in, and, starting

'S

.n

own class to be commod with this scrap of news, we entertained each other with tales of shipwreck and ghosts until we both fell asleep. In the middle of the night we were awakened by a noise such as sailors make in scrubbing the deck. It was the tin spout from the gutter, which was shuffling, scraping, rattling to and fro, gurgling and swashing in a furious manner. The rain was still pouring in torrents, the wind unchanged in force and direction, the sky as black as pitch. There was a dismal prospect of being imprisoned in the hotel all the next day, and we had only the one day to stay in Newburyport.

A different noise aroused us in the morning, the clanging, booming, and jangling of church-bells. From some church near by there came floating at intervals through the tumult great bubbles of sound, which swam into the room through the window and burst there, shaking the air and making the walls vibrate. A jolly little chime farther off kept dancing, to judge by the sound, from the city to the salt-meadows across the bay, and back again. For a long time the silence was broken only by the tolling of a solitary bell in the distance, and we were beginning to get used to it, and sleep was about to return to us, when the whole pack of bells burst forth again in full cry and chased it away effectually. However, there was no reason to grumble at being awakened early on such a morning. The storm was over, but there was still an exhilarating breeze coming in from the sea, fluttering the remaining yellow leaves on the elms and sweeping the torn fleecy clouds across a bright blue sky incredibly clear and lofty. Our plans for passing the day, which had been tacitly shelved overnight under the apprehension that we were to be kept in-doors by the weather, were brought up for discussion, and we decided to walk to Squan Beach, near the mouth of the harbor, feeling that a sight of the surf tumbling in after such a night must be worth a ten- or twelvemiles' tramp.

Along the water front a few old sailors and fishermen were standing, with their

VOL. V. N. 8.-24

ancy. A sqt,

28

hands in their trousers-pockets pipes in their mouths. small boys were more actively er in baling out a couple of boats 30 had been nearly swamped by the Besides these, the only persons at were some countrywomen crossing long bridge on their way to chur being Sunday. The road was firm dry; all the rainfall had been absor by the sandy soil or swept away by stiff sea-breeze, except where it gathered in little rippled pools or h shining in the deep ruts. The color the meadows beside it, patched and mot tled with vivid greens and reddis' browns, threw M- into an ecstasy He declared that he would some da come back and have a hack at it, if h could previously secure a good rain-sto to bring it out. The road makes considerable détour, which we th we might avoid by cutting across meadows. M- was rather opp to this, and with good reason. winding creeks running into the r ows forced us to make our way th some exceedingly difficult thickets at th back, after which we followed a trac leading over a succession of shell-moun covered with a growth of pines and brin ing us back to the high-road at a poi about a mile from where we had left i although we must have walked at lea three in our endeavor to be original an to shorten our journey. So much f assuming that our predecessors mu have been ignoramuses. A long wa through pine woods brought us in sig of a gap in some sand-hills, where a fe wooden buildings were clustered togethe The gap was filled with a tumult of whi foam and dark-blue waves, and M who had not seen the ocean for a year quickened his pace and burst into adjec tives.

The sea was swept clear of sails, an the sky of wings, and the shore of a living creatures. The thundering whit wall of surf, the breaches in which we continually being masked by new er tions, proved how shallow a thing t human soul is, by stirring the stuff whis lies at the bottom of it. The chaos

e

tough as his own hide, right through to

the t

migh

for 2 up e

the two rivers.

beyond made all orderliness of cut ng or of conduct seem priggish; neve, by way of greeting to the sea, led like wild Indians going to batgand tumbled ourselves in the sand.

Ther

to

undertook to walk along the sumthe of the sand-hills to the mouth of ev arbor. M was disappointed the dunes: he had expected someng like the huge sand-heaps of Lake e, and he soon tired of walking ough the fine sand and scaling their 11-like sides and edges, so returned the road. I, however, kept on, and ound a boat and a boatman willing to ow to the town, four miles, for half a ollar; but I had to wait some hours or the turn of the tide. The landscape ereabouts was peculiar. In the exme distance the roofs and steeples of wburyport scintillated in the sun. clar, one or two schooners, their hsails relieved against the opposite fe shore, were tacking out to sea. stre foreground great salt-water pools ofeel-blue, belted with brown reeds yellow sand-hills, slowly dwindled vay through hidden channels as the de went out, and then as slowly began steal up toward their former limits hen it turned. The coppery full moon se astern of us when we had got ell out into the bay. Notwithstanding e inflowing tide, the outward current om the Merrimac was so strong as to use a perceptible change in our rate of ogress when we entered it, and it was ite dark when I landed at one of the arves; the houses were shut up, and body was about.

In the morning, M- left for Amesry. I remained some days longer at ewburyport. One of my walks was › Oldham grave-yard, a short distance om the town. It is across the road om the church, which, being on a hill nd topped by a tall white steeple, must ake a conspicuous landmark out at sea. 'he graves which irregularly emboss hill-side all face seaward, and in y few instances are those of young sons, most of the departed having ed upward of seventy years. A large lies at the foot of the hill, fringed

about with old English elms, their trunks pierced with cavernous hollows or split into strips so thin that they strained and groaned like cordage as the wind moved the great mass of foliage that they sustained. A path from this place leads over another green hill and past some cultivated fields to meet the road to the beach at the south side of the harbor, opposite to Squan Beach. The dunes at this side are much more imposing than the northern ones. They rise along the coast, southward, for many miles, and between them and the inland hills a narrow, tortuous lagoon winding among the salt-marshes affords a landlocked channel navigable by sail-boats. Keeping on past the grave-yard, the road brings one into a tract of bare, rocky fields, broken by low granite hills and dotted with boulders. Willows abound here, shading the few farm-houses, leaning over the little streams, or standing on the borders of the little swampy valleys between the hills. A few beeches and maples were brilliant in gold and red, and a very few white pines and hemlocks opposed their dark foliage to these. There was gold in the rocks, too, it seemed, as well as waving over them. Some parties had started mining-operations, and every now and then a loud explosion, startling the half-wild cattle, testified that they were hard at work.

I met M in the midst of another rain-storm Fas taken to see Mr. Whittier, who resides in the neighborhood. The talk w'as of the old homestead at Haverhill and the changes it has undergone. He doubted if he should care to see it as it is. Yet when M showed him the sketch he had made he was greatly pleased. He expressed himself as fond of trees and scenery, not, like a painter, for their effect, but with a more special and intimate fondness. He likes to make pets of animals, too; and they know it. All the improvident squirrels in the vicinage come to scratch at his window-panes in winter for crumb His poorer neighbors, we found, regard him as their peculiar property, and the cynical ones among them, who believe society above their

again at Danvers, and