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 MERRIMA CK" RIVER;
President and several members of his cabinet, visited Lowell. His
desire to journey hither was quite natural, he, having some eighteen
years before felt the protecting power of cotton breastworks, doubt less had a great curiosity to see the material of his famous fortifica tions transformed into equally famous Merrimack prints and sheet,
ings by these intelligent girls. The distinguished party was received
and addressed by the town authorities, and the president responded.
Triumphal arches of evergreens, banners, and flowers had been
erected, and the escort was composed of " the selectmen, committee
of arrangements, Kirk Boott, chairman, a regiment of militia, a
cavalcade of two hundred citizens, six hundred school children, and
two thousand five hundred factory girls." As each girl was dressed
in holiday attire of unrelieved white, the vast procession of Lowell's
beauty and worth made a deep and enduring impression on all who
had the good fortune to witness it; and it is not a wonder that the
Hero of New Orleans, who had often met and overthrown a hostile
foe, should evince a willingness to surrender for the first time, with out any further hostile demonstration from this all-conquering array
than presenting arms. After the public ceremonies, a number of
the girls, still in gala dress, repaired to the Merrimack Mills and
initiated the president into the art and mystery of making cotton
cloth, the process itself demonstrating the immeasurable difference
between the application of this staple in his hands to the necessities
of barbaric war, and in theirs applied to pleasant and profitable pur-suits of peace. M. Chevalier, an intelligent French gentleman, was
of the president's party, and the splendid pageant made a deep and
lasting impression on his mind; and, as a high official of the French
government, he addressed one of the Massachusetts senators with a
view to securing the attendance of a group of those operatives, with
the necessary machinery, at the recent Paris Exposition, where the
superb New England factory girl at her vocation, and the product
of her skill and industry, could be seen together by a world's admiring representatives. Thus early in the history of manufacturing in
this country, and of Lowell, had these fair daughters acquired a
transatlantic fame, and n(o one doubted, however visionary and ideal
the scheme, and uncertain and doubtful the results of its founding, it
was now a well-established fact.
Mr. Hale, without a clear or well-outlined idea, perhaps, of what
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