like sly water-rats, we stole along nearer the shore, looking for
a place to pitch our camp.

At length, when we had made about seven miles, as far as
Billerica, we moored our boat on the west side of a little rising
ground which in the spring forms an island in the river. Here we
found huckleberries still hanging upon the bushes, where they
seemed to have slowly ripened for our especial use. Bread and
sugar, and cocoa boiled in river water, made our repast, and as
we had drank in the fluvial prospect all day, so now we took a
draft of the water with our evening meal to propitiate the river
gods, and whet our vision for the sights it was to behold. The
sun was setting on the one hand, while our eminence was
contributing its shadow to the night, on the other. It seemed
insensibly to grow lighter as the night shut in, and a distant
and solitary farm-house was revealed, which before lurked in the
shadows of the noon. There was no other house in sight, nor any
cultivated field. To the right and left, as far as the horizon,
were straggling pine woods with their plumes against the sky, and
across the river were rugged hills, covered with shrub oaks,
tangled with grape-vines and ivy, with here and there a gray rock
jutting out from the maze. The sides of these cliffs, though a
quarter of a mile distant, were almost heard to rustle while we
looked at them, it was such a leafy wilderness; a place for fauns
and satyrs, and where bats hung all day to the rocks, and at
evening flitted over the water, and fire-flies husbanded their
light under the grass and leaves against the night. When we had
pitched our tent on the hillside, a few rods from the shore, we
sat looking through its triangular door in the twilight at our
lonely mast on the shore, just seen above the alders, and hardly