f only the summer afternoon
were as long. I knew the roads and byways foot by foot, and could find
my way, if need were, in the night as well as in the day. All the houses
I knew and their occupants; all the good apple trees and whose was every
cow grazing in the roadside pastures or resting beneath a tree. If I
could have my will I would spend the remainder of my days rambling once
more and every day those familiar roads and lanes, like Juno descending
the Olympian path--

"Reflecting with rapid thoughts
There was I, and there, remembering many things."

The most perfect picture of contentment is a cow lying in the green
grass under a green tree chewing her cud; and this contentment I could
realize, give me back the sandy highways and green meadows, my bare
feet, idleness and long summer days.

I was even more familiar with the pastures and the woods than with the
roads. The whole surface of my ambit was spread out like a miniature map
in my eye, and continues to be. Especially I knew the convenient ways of
reaching the river and Beaver pond and the brook which connects it with
the river Charles. It grieves me that this stream has never been
celebrated in verse or prose; while the Concord, which rises on the same
water-shed with the Charles and almost from the same spring, has had
several famous poets and is historic in Revolutionary annals. Longfellow
sang one short song to our river, but he looked out only on the foul
mudbanks of its Cambridge course, shut the door, went back to his study
and composed his subjective Charles.

Slowly did I learn the actual extent and course of the river Charles
which, in my childhood, rose as a shallow stream in the green depths of
a wood lying to the north of Bellingham, flowing east, then south under
the arched bridge near the school house, emptying somewhere in the
southern sky; for, in my childish apprehension, I thought it must run up
from where I was most familiar with it. Its youth and mine were
coincident, and as years were added, the river broadened and lengthened
until I found myself one day at its mouth, in reaching which, it had
touched and watered eighteen towns. It is the father of no considerable
stream, but innumerable rivulets add to its waters. It is about thirty
miles from source to mouth in a direct course though it wanders a
hundred miles in its efforts to find the ocean.

"There runs a shallow brook across our field
For twenty miles where