It remembers the yellow-moccasined Sokokis as they issued from
the Indian Cellar and carried their birchen canoes along the
wooded shore. It was in those years that the silver-skinned
salmon leaped in its crystal depths; the otter and the beaver
crept with sleek wet skins upon its shore; and the brown deer
came down to quench his thirst at its brink while at twilight the
stealthy forms of bear and panther and wolf were mirrored in its
glassy surface.
Time sped; men chained the river's turbulent forces and ordered
it to grind at the mill. Then houses and barns appeared along its
banks, bridges were built, orchards planted, forests changed into
farms, white-painted meetinghouses gleamed through the trees and
distant bells rang from their steeples on quiet Sunday mornings.
All at once myriads of great hewn logs vexed its downward course,
slender logs linked together in long rafts, and huge logs
drifting down singly or in pairs. Men appeared, running hither
and thither like ants, and going through mysterious operations
the reason for which the river could never guess: but the
mill-wheels turned, the great saws buzzed, the smoke from tavern
chimneys rose in the air, and the rattle and clatter of
stage-coaches resounded along the road.
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