The Indians, however, found a friend in the apostle Eliot, who presented a petition in their behalf that the lands lying around the Patucket and Wamesit Falls should be appropriated exclusively for their benefit and use.

The Court granted the petition of the whites, with the exception of the tract in the angle of the two rivers on which the Patuckets were settled.

The Indian title to this tract was not finally extinguished until 1726, when the beautiful name of Wamesit was lost in that of Chelmsford, and the last of the Patuckets turned his back upon the graves of his fathers and sought a new home among the strange Indians of the North.
But what has all this to do with the falls?
When the rail-cars came thundering through his lake country, Wordsworth attempted to exorcise them by a sonnet; and, were I not a very decided Yankee, I might possibly follow his example, and utter in this connection my protest against the desecration of Patucket Falls, and battle with objurgatory stanzas these dams and mills, as Balmawapple shot off his horse-pistol at Stirling Castle.

Rocks and trees, rapids, cascades, and other water- works are doubtless all very well; but on the whole, considering our seven months of frost, are not cotton shirts and woollen coats still better?
As for the spirits of the river, the Merrimac Naiads, or whatever may be their name in Indian vocabulary, they have no good reason for complaint; inasmuch as Nature, in marking and scooping out the channel of their stream, seems to have had an eye to the useful rather than the picturesque.

After a few preliminary antics and youthful vagaries up among the White Hills, the Merrimac comes down to the seaboard, a clear, cheerful, hard-working Yankee river.