jug?
Well then you have never studied the boy's traditional natural history.
Therein are recorded things unknown to science; discoveries never
divulged, secrets more deep than the Elusinian, passed on from initiate
to initiate for countless generations. Nature has told them only to
children, and when grown to manhood, seals their lips with that impious
injunction to put away childish things.

It is not a river nor a landscape that gives to a town its real
importance; it is the character of its men and women. That is the
pinnacle from which to view its landscape. Before cities and factories
had begun to stir the ambition and attract the young by opportunities
for fortune and fame, Bellingham was the home of an intelligent,
liberty-loving people; a community self-sufficing, sharing its abundance
with those less abounding. It was thus the best place in the world to be
born about the first third of the last century--to be explicit, in
eighteen hundred and thirty-three. And I wish that I and the companions
of my childhood could have imitated Plutarch who said "I live in a
little town and choose to live there lest it should become smaller."

All that is dear remains as it was, and it is my delight to remember and
magnify what it is to me. My friends laugh when I say it is better to be
remembered in Bellingham than to be famous in ten cities. It has been my
misfortune never to have lived in any other place that in a few years,
did not change and forget itself. I cannot find anything in my later
residences that continues to connect me with them. They have cut a
street through me, they have torn down and rebuilt my old nests; and I
know no more melancholy intimation of the small consequence of one's
life and associations than this. Therefore I thank Heaven for a town
removed from the track of progress, uninvaded by summer visitors and all
business enterprises; land left sacred to its native inhabitants, a
sluggish stream, unprofitable earth, huckleberry bushes and the
imagination. Since this is so, and there is little fear of intrusion by
the curious or the mercenary, I will confide to my readers the situation
of the town with the understanding that they will never attempt to
verify my description.

It lies in the southwestern corner of Norfolk county, is eight miles
long from north to south, from three to four in width. The brooks and
ponds in the southern part have their outlet into the Blackstone river;
those of the north