rose to the surface, and through which the little river found its passage.  The part which might be termed the key-stone of the dam, was only twenty yards wide, and immediately below it, the rocks fell away rapidly, quite sixty feet, carrying down the waste water in a sort of fall.  Here the mill-wright announced his determination to commence operations at once, putting in a protest against destroying the works of the beavers.  A pond of four hundred acres being too great a luxury for the region, the man was overruled, and the labour commenced.

The first blow was struck against the dam about nine o’clock, on the 2d day of May, 1765, and, by evening, the little sylvan-looking lake, which had lain embedded in the forest, glittering in the morning sun, unruffled by a breath of air, had entirely disappeared!  In its place, there remained an open expanse of wet mud, thickly covered with pools and the remains of beaver-houses, with a small river winding its way slowly through the slime.  The change to the eye was melancholy indeed; though the prospect was cheering to the agriculturist.  No sooner did the water obtain a little passage, than it began to clear the way for itself, gushing out in a torrent, through the pass already mentioned.

The following morning, Captain Willoughby almost mourned over the works of his hands.  The scene was so very different from that it had presented when the flats were covered with water, that it was impossible not to feel the change.  For quite a month, it had an influence on the whole party.  Nick, in particular, denounced it, as unwise and uncalled for, though he had made his price out of the very circumstance in prospective; and even Sergeant Joyce was compelled to admit that the knoll, an island no longer, had lost quite half its security as a military position.  The next month, however, brought other changes.  Half the pools had vanished by drainings and evaporation; the mud had begun to crack, and, in some places to pulverize; while the upper margin of the old pond had become sufficiently firm to permit the oxen to walk over it, without miring.  Fences of trees, brush, and even rails, enclosed, on this portion of the flats, quite fifty acres of land; and Indian corn, oats, pumpkins, peas, potatoes, flax, and several other sorts of seed, were already in the ground.  The spring proved dry, and the sun of the forty-third degree of latitude was doing its work, with great power and beneficence.  What was of nearly equal importance, the age of the pond had prevented any recent accumulation of vegetable matter, and consequently spared those who laboured around the spot, the impurities of atmosphere usually consequent on its decay.  Grass-seed, too, had been liberally scattered on favourable places, and things began to assume the appearance of what is termed “living.”