gh prosperity and utter ruin.

I think I should soon become strongly attached to our way of life, so
independent and untroubled by the forms and restrictions of society. The
house is very pleasantly situated,--half a mile distant from where the
town begins to be thickly settled, and on a swell of land, with the road
running at a distance of fifty yards, and a grassy tract and a
gravel-walk between. Beyond the road rolls the Kennebec, here two or
three hundred yards wide. Putting my head out of the window, I can see
it flowing steadily along straightway between wooded banks; but arriving
nearly opposite the house, there is a large and level sand island in the
middle of the stream; and just below the island the current is further
interrupted by the works of the mill-dam, which is perhaps
half-finished, yet still in so rude a state that it looks as much like
the ruins of a dam destroyed by the spring freshets as like the
foundations of a dam yet to be. Irishmen and Canadians toil at work on
it, and the echoes of their hammering and of the voices come across the
river and up to this window. Then there is a sound of the wind among the
trees round the house; and when that is silent, the calm, full, distant
voice of the river becomes audible. Looking downward thither, I see the
rush of the current, and mark the different eddies, with here and there
white specks or streaks of foam; and often a log comes floating on,
glistening in the sun, as it rolls over among the eddies, having
voyaged, for aught I know, hundreds of miles from the wild, upper
sources of the river, passing down, down, between lines of forest, and
sometimes a rough clearing, till here it floats along by cultivated
banks, and will soon pass by the village. Sometimes a long raft of
boards comes along, requiring the nicest skill in navigating it through
the narrow passage left by the mill-dam. Chaises and wagons occasionally
go along the road, the riders all giving a passing glance at the dam, or
perhaps alighting to examine it more fully, and at last departing with
ominous shakes of the head as to the result of the enterprise. My
position is so far retired from the river and mill-dam, that, though the
latter is really rather a scene, yet a sort of quiet seems to be
diffused over the whole. Two or three times a day this quiet is broken
by the sudden thunder from a quarry, where the workmen are blasting
rocks for the dam; and a peal of thunder sounds strange in such