Confessions of Boyhood | Page 5

and composed his subjective Charles.
Slowly did I learn the actual extent and course of the river Charles which, in my childhood, rose as a shallow stream in the green depths of a wood lying to the north of Bellingham, flowing east, then south under the arched bridge near the school house, emptying somewhere in the southern sky; for, in my childish apprehension, I thought it must run up from where I was most familiar with it. Its youth and mine were coincident, and as years were added, the river broadened and lengthened until I found myself one day at its mouth, in reaching which, it had touched and watered eighteen towns. It is the father of no considerable stream, but innumerable rivulets add to its waters. It is about thirty miles from source to mouth in a direct course though it wanders a hundred miles in its efforts to find the ocean.
"There runs a shallow brook across our field For twenty miles where the black crow flies five."
It never has any headlong haste to arrive. It saunters like a schoolboy and stops to visit a thousand recesses and indentations of upland and meadow. It stays for a cow to drink, or an alder to root itself in the bank, or to explore a swamp, and it rather wriggles than runs through its eighteen townships. It is likely to stop at any one of them and give up the effort to reach the sea. For my part I wish it had, and actually, as in my memory and fancy, ended at the outermost shores of Bellingham.
The revolution of the earth can only account for the flow of the Charles for there is no perceptible descent of the land. I like to think it is ruled by the stars and not by the configuration of the earth's surface. It is vagrant and nomadic in its habits, moving on a little, returning, winding and doubling, uncertain of its own intentions, a brother of the English Wye, said to derive its name from Vaga, the wanderer, or vagabond. Since its waters sprang from their fountain head and learned that their destiny was to become a river, they have never been in haste to reach its turbid outlet, but go reluctantly from town to town with whole days before them, yes, perhaps, it was an age in making its first journey. It loses its way often, but cares not so there be a pleasant meadow to meander through or a contemplative fisherman to companion its course. The Charles has never gained force, as man is said to do, by having obstacles to overcome. It treats all the dams which intercept its current with a lenient benevolence, never having been known to carry one away. Meeting a dam, it turns the other cheek; in other words it patiently retires into its higher channels and fountains, filling and stilling the little babbling brooks by its backward impulse, contented to be a pond when it cannot be a river. It scarcely resisted the ancients of Dedham, when they attempted to steal it. Having no water-shed of its own, the Charles is not subject to those floods and frenzies which make so many other streams dangerous. Sedges and flags, the skunk cabbage and marsh marigold, grape vines, alders, willows and button bush abound along its shores. White and yellow lilies and the pickerel weed almost choke its course in many places. Under the leaves of these hides himself that fish which old anglers named the water-wolf, the pickerel, who preys upon his smaller brothers and sisters. All is fish that comes into his net. There was no more exciting moment in my boyhood than when a pickerel swallowed the frog's leg on my hook and began to retreat with it under the lily pads. In the stream also were horned pouts, perch, shiners and that silly little fish we called "kivers," for which my earliest fishing was done with a bent pin. I was naturally capacitated for fishing by my fondness for silence and solitude. The mystery of water drew me from one pool to another and a constant expectancy of a larger fish than had ever been caught. I was not aware that words could make him as big as one chose; but I had pictured him in my mind in all his immense and shining length. What I most wished to catch was a leviathan; my mother when reading the word in the Bible had told me it meant some kind of great fish, the largest in the world. Once indeed I thought I had him on my hook, but it proved only a sunken log. Of stillness and solitude I had my fill strolling along the banks of the river. It seemed like Sunday without the