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

ut seen from there is too ethereally blue to be the same
which the like of us have ever climbed. Its name is said to
mean “The Two Breasts,” there being two eminences some
distance apart. The highest, which is about fourteen hundred
feet above the sea, probably affords a more extensive
view of the Merrimack valley and the adjacent country than
any other hill, though it is somewhat obstructed by woods.
Only a few short reaches of the river are visible, but you can
trace its course far down stream by the sandy tracts on its
banks.
A little south of Uncannunuc, about sixty years ago, as the
story goes, an old woman who went out to gather pennyroyal,
tript her foot in the bail of a small brass kettle in the
dead grass and bushes. Some say that flints and charcoal and
some traces of a camp were also found. This kettle, holding
about four quarts, is still preserved and used to dye thread
in. It is supposed to have belonged to some old French or
Indian hunter, who was killed in one of his hunting or scouting
excursions, and so never returned to look after his kettle.
But we were most interested to hear of the pennyroyal, it is
soothing to be reminded that wild nature produces anything
Henry David Thoreau
199
ready for the use of man. Men know that something is good.
One says that it is yellow-dock, another that it is bitter-sweet,
another that it is slippery-elm bark, burdock, catnip, calamint,
elicampane, thoroughwort, or pennyroyal. A man may
esteem himself happy when that which is his food is also his
medicine. There is no kind of herb, but somebody or other
says that it is good. I am very glad to hear it. It reminds me
of the first chapter of Genesis. But how should they know
that it is good? That is the mystery to me. I am always agreeably
disappointed; it is incredible that they should have found
it out. Since all things are good, men fail at last to distinguish
which is the bane, and which the antidote. There are
sure to be two prescriptions diametrically opposite. Stuff a
cold and starve a cold are but two ways. They are the two
practices both always in full blast. Yet you must take advice
of the one school as if there was no other. In respect to religion
and the healing art, all nations are still in a state of
barbarism. In the most civilized countries the priest is still
but a Powwow, and the physician a Great Medicine. Consider
the deference which is everywhere paid to a doctor’s
opinion. Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of