Anyhow they came adown the river; on its waters on rafts, by its shores
in wains or bestriding their horses or their kine, or afoot, till they
had a mind to abide; and there as it fell they stayed their travel, and
spread from each side of the river, and fought with the wood and its wild
things, that they might make to themselves a dwelling-place on the face
of the earth.

So they cut down the trees, and burned their stumps that the grass might
grow sweet for their kine and sheep and horses; and they diked the river
where need was all through the plain, and far up into the wild-wood to
bridle the winter floods: and they made them boats to ferry them over,
and to float down stream and track up-stream: they fished the river's
eddies also with net and with line; and drew drift from out of it of far-
travelled wood and other matters; and the gravel of its shallows they
washed for gold; and it became their friend, and they loved it, and gave
it a name, and called it the Dusky, and the Glassy, and the
Mirkwood-water; for the names of it changed with the generations of man.

There then in the clearing of the wood that for many years grew greater
yearly they drave their beasts to pasture in the new-made meadows, where
year by year the grass grew sweeter as the sun shone on it and the
standing waters went from it; and now in the year whereof the tale
telleth it was a fair and smiling plain, and no folk might have a better
meadow.

But long before that had they learned the craft of tillage and taken heed
to the acres and begun to grow wheat and rye thereon round about their
roofs; the spade came into their hands, and they bethought them of the
plough-share, and the tillage spread and grew, and there was no lack of
bread.