The Merrimack River: its source and its tributaries. Embracing a history of manufactures, and of the towns along its course; their geography, topography, and products, with a description of the magnificent natural scenery about its upper waters./ By J. W. Meader.

THE ME1~RIM ACK RIVE I;
"And still upon the lawn before,
The peaceful sheep were nibbling nigh;
But Farmer Willey at his door
Stood not to count them with his eye.
"And in the dwelling — 0 despair! -
The silent room, the vacant bed!
The children's little shoes were there, But whither were the children fled?
That day a woman's head, all gashed,
Its long hair streaming in the flow,
Went o'er the dam, and then was dashed
Among the whirlpools down below.
"And farther down, by Saco's side,
They found the mangled forms of four,
Held in an eddy of the tide;
But Mary, she was seen no more.
"Yet never to this mournful vale
Shall any maid, in summer time,
Come, without thinking of the tale
I now have told you in my rhyme.
"And when the Willey House is gone,
And its last rafter is decayed,
Its history may yet live on
In this your ballad that I made."
The gateway of the Notch is twenty-two feet wide, and is for
miles a narrow gorge, scarcely wide enough for the road and the
Saco River, which foams through the Notch, a rapid torrent.
From the mountain-side comes tumbling a magnificent cascade,
more than eight hundred feet high, directly to the road and river.
Another, not so high, falls over three several precipices, over the
last of which it divides into three separate streams, uniting again at
the foot of the mountain.
Ascending the mountain, a plain is reached far up, which is the
base of the final pinnacle, towering fifteen hundred feet; still higher, a ragged, barren summit, where, in clear weather, the most extensive prospect opens, to be found east of the Rocky Mountains.
The vision extends frem the deep blue of the broad Atlantic to the
deep green of the Vermont hills; from the Canadas on the north to
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