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.

ITS SOUPCE AN~D ITS TPIBUT.'IPIES.
The source of the Merrimack River is more than six thousand
feet above the level of the sea, and thus it is not strange that
it has the quality of purity unexcelled, and its course, through
its first forty or fifty miles, is magnificently wild and grand;
the silvery, transparent river, meandering gently through the
sylvan forest shade, or dashing and roaring through the narrow
chasm, or leaping and tumbling in a milky volume over the rocky
falls, and then calming down like a mild and still'May morning,
and settling into dark and quiet pools, where the noble salmon was
wvont to lay, like a tiger in his lair, crouching, with a keen eye and
invincible prowess for the unwary prey. HIere, the great blue
heron, tall as a well-grown youth, stalks majestically up and down,
with an eager eye on the unapproachable trout, more difficult to
obtain than the simple perch and shiner among the reeds and rushes
on the marshes of his usual fishing-ground; the sleek, sable mink
breeds in abundance and security; the great, clumsy, brown bear,
though unexpert, tries his skill at diving, trout being for him a rare
and savory delicacy; the fish-hawk and the fish-eagle perch above
the pure, transparent tide, and, with resistless swoop, bring up the
spottdd captives. The wild deer comes down from the alpine surroundings, not timid here, and cools and refreshes itself in the
pellucid current. Numerous aquatic fowl here also congregate;
the little wood duck, the most singular specimen of ornithology, a
combination of water-fowl and land-fowl, at home equally on the
watter, or perched on a forest tree. Silence and solitude brood over
all this lovely land, save when the wild beast calls to his mate, or
howls fiercely and defiantly along some almost inaccessible precipice, or some bird shoots screaming across the magnificent valley.
Huge birds build their nests among the mountain fastnesses, and
flap their expansive wings lazily from crag to crag, or rest on a
trusty branch of some gigantic forest tree. Conspicuous here is
found primeval nature, and all her creatures here unerringly proclaim that man, the foremost of them all, as yet has not appeared,
except by proxy; that his cunning and rapacity, his cupidity and
cruelty are, happily, unknowh in this secluded spot. The mountains here, that range along the stream on either side, are covered
with a dense, unbroken wilderness, high up, and it is curious to
observe the line of demarcation between the deciduous and the ever
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