“Send for the milingtary.” NOAH CLAYPOLE in Oliver Twist. WHAT’S now in the wind? Sounds of distant music float in at my window on this still October air. Hurrying drum-beat, shrill fife-tones, wailing bugle-notes, and, by way of accompaniment, hurrahs from the urchins on the crowded sidewalks. Here come the citizen-soldiers, each martial foot beating […]

The writer, when residing in Lowell, in 1843 contributed this and the companion pieces to ‘The Stranger’ in Lowell. This, then, is Lowell,–a city springing up, like the enchanted palaces of the Arabian tales, as it were in a single night, stretching far and wide its chaos of brick masonry and painted shingles, filling the […]

MANY years ago I read, in some old chronicle of the early history of New England, a paragraph which has ever since haunted my memory, calling up romantic associations of wild Nature and wilder man:– “The Sachem Wonolanset, who lived by the Groat Falls of Patucket, on the Merrimac.” It was with this passage in […]

To a population like that of Lowell, the weekly respite from monotonous in-door toil afforded by the first day of the week is particularly grateful. Sabbath comes to the weary and overworked operative emphatically as a day of rest. It opens upon him somewhat as it did upon George Herbert, as he describes it in […]

“He spak to the spynnsters to spynnen it oute.” PIERS PLOUGHMAN. THIS evening, the 20th of the ninth month, is the time fixed upon for lighting the mills for night-labor; and I have just returned from witnessing for the first time the effect of the new illumination. Passing over the bridge, nearly to the Dracut […]

For the last few days the fine weather has lured me away from books and papers and the close air of dwellings into the open fields, and under the soft, warm sunshine, and the softer light of a full moon. The loveliest season of the whole year–that transient but delightful interval between the storms of […]

“Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We dare n’t go a-hunting For fear of little men. Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap, Gray cock’s feather.” ALLINGHAM. IT was from a profound knowledge of human nature that Lord Bacon, in discoursing upon truth, remarked that a mixture of a […]

[1869.] LOOKING at the Government Chart of Lake Erie, one sees the outlines of a long, narrow island, stretching along the shore of Canada West, opposite the point where Loudon District pushes its low, wooded wedge into the lake. This is Long Point Island, known and dreaded by the navigators of the inland sea which […]

FASCINATION, saith Henry Cornelius Agrippa, in the fiftieth chapter of his first book on Occult Philosophy, “is a binding which comes of the spirit of the witch through the eyes of him that is bewitched, entering to his heart; for the eye being opened and intent upon any one, with a strong imagination doth dart […]

“A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; a beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.” EMERSON’S Essays, Second Series, iv., p. 162. A FEW days since I was walking with a friend, who, unfortunately for […]

“Our Father Time is weak and gray, Awaiting for the better day; See how idiot-like he stands, Fumbling his old palsied hands!” SHELLEY’s Masque of Anarchy. “STAGE ready, gentlemen! Stage for campground, Derry! Second Advent camp-meeting!” Accustomed as I begin to feel to the ordinary sights and sounds of this busy city, I was, I […]

THE Brownie sits in the Scotchman’s room, And eats his meat and drinks his ale, And beats the maid with her unused broom, And the lazy lout with his idle flail; But he sweeps the floor and threshes the corn, And hies him away ere the break of dawn. The shade of Denmark fled from […]

On the declivity of a hill in Salisbury, Essex County, is a fountain of clear water, gushing from the very roots of a venerable oak. It is about two miles from the junction of the Powow River with the Merrimac. TRAVELLER! on thy journey toiling By the swift Powow, With the summer sunshine falling On […]

The village of Haverhill, on the Merrimac, called by the Indians Pentucket, was for nearly seventeen years a frontier town, and during thirty years endured all the horrors of savage warfare. In the year 1708, a combined body of French and Indians, under the command of De Chaillons, and Hertel de Rouville, the famous and […]

In the early part of the present century, a fragment of a statue, rudely chiselled from dark gray stone, was found in the town of Bradford, on the Merrimac. Its origin must be left entirely to conjecture. The fact that the ancient Northmen visited the north-east coast of North America and probably New England, some […]

Polan, chief of the Sokokis Indians of the country between Agamenticus and Casco Bay, was killed at Windham on Sebago Lake in the spring of 1756. After the whites had retired, the surviving Indians “swayed” or bent down a young tree until its roots were upturned, placed the body of their chief beneath it, then […]

Ibn Batuta, the celebrated Mussulman traveller of the fourteenth century, speaks of a cypress-tree in Ceylon, universally held sacred by the natives, the leaves of which were said to fall only at certain intervals, and he who had the happiness to find and eat one of them was restored, at once, to youth and vigor. […]

The incidents upon which the following ballad has its foundation about the year 1660. Thomas Macy was one of the first, if not the first white settler of Nantucket. The career of Macy is briefly but carefully outlined in James S. Pike’s The New Puritan. THE goodman sat beside his door One sultry afternoon, With […]

ERE down yon blue Carpathian hills The sun shall sink again, Farewell to life and all its ills, Farewell to cell and chain! These prison shades are dark and cold, But, darker far than they, The shadow of a sorrow old Is on my heart alway. For since the day when Warkworth wood Closed o’er […]

In 1658 two young persons, son and daughter of Lawrence Smithwick of Salem, who had himself been imprisoned and deprived of nearly all his property for having entertained Quakers at his house, were fined for non-attendance at church. They being unable to pay the fine, the General Court issued an order empowering “the Treasurer of […]