Page:A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.djvu/120

114 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,"—

At length we doubled a low shrubby islet, call 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 Chelmsford and the neighboring towns. We passed Wicasuck Island, which contains seventy acres or more, on our right between Chelmsford and Tyngsboro'. 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 £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