A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - Pennsylvania State ...

came to what seemed the guests’ apartment, which was neat,
and even had an air of refinement about it, and I was glad to
find a map against the wall which would direct me on my
journey on the morrow. At length I heard a step in a distant
apartment, which was the first I had entered, and went to
see if the landlord had come in; but it proved to be only a
child, one of those whose voices I had heard, probably his
son, and between him and me stood in the doorway a large
watch-dog, which growled at me, and looked as if he would
presently spring, but the boy did not speak to him; and when
I asked for a glass of water, he briefly said, “It runs in the
corner.” So I took a mug from the counter and went out of
doors, and searched round the corner of the house, but could
find neither well nor spring, nor any water but the stream
which ran all along the front. I came back, therefore, and,
setting down the mug, asked the child if the stream was good
to drink; whereupon he seized the mug, and, going to the
corner of the room, where a cool spring which issued from
the mountain behind trickled through a pipe into the apartment,
filled it, and drank, and gave it to me empty again,
and, calling to the dog, rushed out of doors. Erelong some
A <strong>Week</strong> on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
158
of the hired men made their appearance, and drank at the
spring, and lazily washed themselves and combed their hair
in silence, and some sat down as if weary, and fell asleep in
their seats. But all the while I saw no women, though I sometimes
heard a bustle in that part of the house from which the
spring came.
At length Rice himself came in, for it was now dark, with
an ox-whip in his hand, breathing hard, and he too soon
settled down into his seat not far from me, as if, now that his
day’s work was done, he had no farther to travel, but only to
digest his supper at his leisure. When I asked him if he could
give me a bed, he said there was one ready, in such a tone as
implied that I ought to have known it, and the less said about
that the better. So far so good. And yet he continued to look
at me as if he would fain have me say something further like
a traveller. I remarked, that it was a wild and rugged country
he inhabited, and worth coming many miles to see. “Not so
very rough neither,” said he, and appealed to his men to bear
witness to the breadth and smoothness of his fields, which
consisted in all of one small interval, and to the size of his
crops; “and if we have some hills,” added he, “there’s no bet-