The white man comes, pale as the dawn, with a load of thought,
with a slumbering intelligence as a fire raked up, knowing well
what he knows, not guessing but calculating; strong in community,
yielding obedience to authority; of experienced race; of
wonderful, wonderful common sense; dull but capable, slow but
persevering, severe but just, of little humor but genuine; a
laboring man, despising game and sport; building a house that
endures, a framed house. He buys the Indian's moccasins and
baskets, then buys his hunting-grounds, and at length forgets
where he is buried and ploughs up his bones. And here town
records, old, tattered, time-worn, weather-stained chronicles,
contain the Indian sachem's mark perchance, an arrow or a beaver,
and the few fatal words by which he deeded his hunting-grounds
away. He comes with a list of ancient Saxon, Norman, and Celtic
names, and strews them up and down this river,--Framingham,
Sudbury, Bedford, Carlisle, Billerica, Chelmsford,--and this is
New Angle-land, and these are the New West Saxons whom the Red
Men call, not Angle-ish or English, but Yengeese, and so at last
they are known for Yankees.

When we were opposite to the middle of Billerica, the fields on
either hand had a soft and cultivated English aspect, the village
spire being seen over the copses which skirt the river, and
sometimes an orchard straggled down to the water-side, though,
generally, our course this forenoon was the wildest part of our
voyage. It seemed that men led a quiet and very civil life
there. The inhabitants were plainly cultivators of the earth,
and lived under an organized political government. The
school-house stood with a meek aspect, entreating a long truce to
war and savage life. Every one finds by his own experience, as