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A WALK ABOUT TOWN.

Many a day and many a year, perhaps, has passed since you, who in some distant region turn the leaves of this book, by chance brought to your door, like

"The adventurous boy that asks his little share,

And hies from home with many a gossip's prayer,"

left the rugged boundaries of your native town to re

turn no more.

A score of winters' snows and summers' suns have frozen and warmed the hills and valleys of the old-time Charmingfare since you were there.

Time does not always efface the memory of one's native soil, and I make no doubt that some of all the thousand pleasant fancies of your childhood still linger among the unforgotten things of yore. At all events, if you are blessed with patient disposition, and can get on with me in a somewhat tedious, it may be, but well intentioned chapter, why, then, townsman of mine,

lend me your ears, or walk with me, I care not which, so we but get well on together.

You may somewhat marvel at my taste, but let me take you to the low and almost buried pond, called Kinicum. It is the only thing, so far as I know, this and the surrounding swamp, which has an original Indian name. And this sad type of the ancient owners of the soil is fast disappearing. 'Tis a slow and toilsome process, this penetrating the swamp, but brushing aside the rough spruce twigs, and crowding through the brakes, over whose tops one can hardly see, ever and anon falling into a hole in this place, productive of staging poles from time immemorial, - at length appears the pond, its black waters now reduced to the circumference of a few rods, while on the tough and elastic lichen slowly overgrowing it, you can approach nearly to the water's edge. As one steps here and there among the fox-gloves, sinking and rising with the fibrous soil, if soil it may be called, a pool, dark and deep enough to have engulfed a rebellious tribe, seems below. The dense and sombre vegetation of the swamp meets above your head; bright red and poisonous berries cluster around. The tall huckleberry peers up among the brakes, and perchance an owl sits winking and blinking at you, from some day retreat. Here are always solitude, shade and silence at noonday, unless broken by some adventurous rambler like ourselves. There are no merry birds to enliven us with

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OLD UNION BAPTIST MEETING HOUSE Built in 1818, By The Rev. Moses Bean. Pastor.

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refuge here.

songs. They are mostly of the solitary kind, who take "Yon moping owl" has surely no music in his composition.

The pond appears once to have been of large circumference, but when, or how long it has been in growing over, no one can tell. As we tug and push, on our way out, we may startle from his cover an awkward hopping rabbit, or a partridge suddenly flies in air, and the startled jay calls and screams from the tree tops.

Having got out and walked through several pastures and fields, we hit on an unfinished road, or rangeway. It is overgrown with grass and encumbered with stones so as not to be passable for pleasure carriages, but is nevertheless a good place to walk. To our right, as we go on, is the railroad track, through Brown's cran berry meadow, connecting the seaport of New Hamp shire with its Capital. A railroad, you ask, in Candia, which enjoyed a stage coach and mail once a week? so respectable, quiet and dozy a place, be visited by railroads? Most certainly; what else can one expect when a city has come and settled down not a dozen miles from us. While you are growing old, and, it may be, rheumatic, Charmingfare grows young and lends a hand to the progress of the age.

True, there were some who were loth to see the beauty of their ancient possessions spoiled, and their fine farms cut into unseemly triangles, by this utilitarian

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