It is no
light thing to abandon one's own country and household gods. Touching
and beautiful was the injunction of the prophet of the Hebrews:
"Ye shall not oppress the stranger; for ye know the heart of the
stranger, seeing that ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."
PATUCKET FALLS.
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 my mind that I visited for the first time
the Rapids of the Merrimac, above Lowell.
Passing up the street by the Hospital, a large and elegant mansion
surrounded by trees and shrubbery and climbing vines, I found myself,
after walking a few rods farther, in full view of the Merrimac. A deep
and rocky channel stretched between me and the Dracut shore, along which
rushed the shallow water,--a feeble, broken, and tortuous current,
winding its way among splintered rocks, rising sharp and jagged in all
directions. Drained above the falls by the canal, it resembled some
mountain streamlet of old Spain, or some Arabian wady, exhausted by a
year's drought.
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