CHAPTER XIV 

 OLD BOATS 



ANYTHING which man has hewn from stone or 

 shaped from wood, put to the uses of his pleasure 

 or his toil, and then at length abandoned to crum- 

 ble slowly back into its elements of soil or metal, is 

 fraught for the beholder with a wistful appeal, whether 

 it be the pyramids of Egyptian kings, or an abandoned 

 farmhouse on the road to Moosilauke, or only a rusty 

 hay-rake in a field now overgrown with golden-rod and 

 Queen Anne's lace, and fast surrendering to the return- 

 ing tide of the forest. A pyramid may thrill us by its 

 tremendousness; we may dream how once the legions 

 of Mark Antony encamped below it, how the eagles of 

 Napoleon went tossing past. But in the end we shall 

 reflect on the toiling slaves who built it, block upon 

 heavy block, to be a monarch's tomb, and on the mon- 

 arch who now lies beneath (if his mummy has not been 

 transferred to the British Museum). The old gray 

 house by the roadside, abandoned, desolate, with a 

 bittersweet vine entwined around the chimney and a 

 raspberry bush pushing up through the rotted doorsill, 



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