Page:A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.djvu/173

Rh 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 swathe at a hundred and five!—Loevwell'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 grave-stone of Joseph Hassell, who, as was elsewhere recorded, with his wife Anna and son Benjamin, and Mary Marks, "were slain by our Indian enemies on Sept. 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.

Far away from here, in Lancaster, with another companion, I have crossed the broad valley of the Nashua, over which we had so long looked westward from the Concord hills without seeing it to the blue mountains in