For here was this shouting river at our feet, whose
power had been running to waste since the day when the
Laurentian hills first heaved themselves above the hot
Atlantic; and that day, I am informed by Mr. Agassiz, was
the first day in the history of this solid world. Here
was water-power enough for forty fly-wheels, were it
necessary to send heavenward twenty moons. Here was
solid timber enough for a hundred dams, yet only one was
necessary to give motion to the fly-wheels. Here was
retirement,--freedom from criticism, an escape from the
journalists, who would not embarrass us by telling of
every cracked brick which had to be rejected from the
structure. We had lived in No. 9 now for six weeks, and
not an "own correspondent" of them all had yet told what
Rev. Mr. Ingham had for dinner.

Of course I wrote to George Orcutt at once of our
great discovery, and he came up at once to examine the
situation. On the whole, it pleased him. He could not
take the site I proposed for the dam, because this very
clay there made the channel treacherous, and there was
danger that the stream would work out a new career. But
lower down we found a stony gorge with which George was
satisfied; he traced out a line for a railway by which,
of their own weight, the brick-cars could run to the
centrings; he showed us where, with some excavations, the
fly-wheels could be placed exactly above the great mill-
wheels, that no power might be wasted, and explained to
us how, when the gigantic structure was finished, the
BRICK MOON would gently roll down its ways upon the rapid