the black crow flies five."

It never has any headlong haste to arrive. It saunters like a schoolboy
and stops to visit a thousand recesses and indentations of upland and
meadow. It stays for a cow to drink, or an alder to root itself in the
bank, or to explore a swamp, and it rather wriggles than runs through
its eighteen townships. It is likely to stop at any one of them and give
up the effort to reach the sea. For my part I wish it had, and actually,
as in my memory and fancy, ended at the outermost shores of Bellingham.

The revolution of the earth can only account for the flow of the Charles
for there is no perceptible descent of the land. I like to think it is
ruled by the stars and not by the configuration of the earth's surface.
It is vagrant and nomadic in its habits, moving on a little, returning,
winding and doubling, uncertain of its own intentions, a brother of the
English Wye, said to derive its name from _Vaga_, the wanderer, or
vagabond. Since its waters sprang from their fountain head and learned
that their destiny was to become a river, they have never been in haste
to reach its turbid outlet, but go reluctantly from town to town with
whole days before them, yes, perhaps, it was an age in making its first
journey. It loses its way often, but cares not so there be a pleasant
meadow to meander through or a contemplative fisherman to companion its
course. The Charles has never gained force, as man is said to do, by
having obstacles to overcome. It treats all the dams which intercept its
current with a lenient benevolence, never having been known to carry one
away. Meeting a dam, it turns the other cheek; in other words it
patiently retires into its higher channels and fountains, filling and
stilling the little babbling brooks by its backward impulse, contented
to be a pond when it cannot be a river. It scarcely resisted the
ancients of Dedham, when they attempted to steal it. Having no water-shed
of its own, the Charles is not subject to those floods and frenzies
which make so many other streams dangerous. Sedges and flags, the skunk
cabbage and marsh marigold, grape vines, alders, willows and button bush
abound along its shores. White and yellow lilies and the pickerel weed
almost choke its course in many places. Under the leaves of these hides
himself that fish which old anglers named the water-wolf, the pickerel,
who preys upon his smaller brothers and sisters. All is fish that comes
into his net. Ther