t, it will be full
again to-morrow. I do not regard them as litter, to be swept out, but
accept them as suitable straw or matting for the bottom of my carriage.
When I turn up into the mouth of the Assabet, which is wooded, large
fleets of leaves are floating on its surface, as it were getting out to
sea, with room to tack; but next the shore, a little farther up, they
are thicker than foam, quite concealing the water for a rod in width,
under and amid the Alders, Button-Bushes, and Maples, still perfectly
light and dry, with fibre unrelaxed; and at a rocky bend where they are
met and stopped by the morning wind, they sometimes form a broad and
dense crescent quite across the river. When I turn my prow that way, and
the wave which it makes strikes them, list what a pleasant rustling from
these dry substances grating on one another! Often it is their
undulation only which reveals the water beneath them. Also every motion
of the wood-turtle on the shore is betrayed by their rustling there. Or
even in mid-channel, when the wind rises, I hear them blown with a
rustling sound. Higher up they are slowly moving round and round in some
great eddy which the river makes, as that at the "Leaning Hemlocks,"
where the water is deep, and the current is wearing into the bank.

Perchance, in the afternoon of such a day, when the water is perfectly
calm and full of reflections, I paddle gently down the main stream, and,
turning up the Assabet, reach a quiet cove, where I unexpectedly find
myself surrounded by myriads of leaves, like fellow-voyagers, which seem
to have the same purpose, or want of purpose, with myself. See this
great fleet of scattered leaf-boats which we paddle amid, in this smooth
river-bay, each one curled up on every side by the sun's skill, each
nerve a stiff spruce-knee,--like boats of hide, and of all patterns,
Charon's boat probably among the rest, and some with lofty prows and
poops, like the stately vessels of the ancients, scarcely moving in the
sluggish current,--like the great fleets, the dense Chinese cities of
boats, with which you mingle on entering some great mart, some New York
or Canton, which we are all steadily approaching together. How gently
each has been deposited on the water! No violence has been used towards
them yet, though, perchance, palpitating hearts were present at the
launching. And painted ducks, too, the splendid wood-duck among the
rest, often come to sail and float amid the painted le