...I am useless, one more girl who couldn't be sold. When I visit the family now, I wrap my American successes around me like a pr...ivate shawl. I am worthy of eating the food. From afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally. They only say, "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls," because that is what one says about daughters. But I watched such words come out of my own mother's and father's mouths; I looked at their ink drawing of poor people snagging their neighbors' flotage with long flood hooks and pushing the girl babies on down the river. And I had to get out of hating range. I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, "Girls are necessary too"; I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession. Perhaps it was a saying in another village.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some carpenters were at work here mending a scow on the green and sloping bank. The strokes of their mallets echoed from shore to ...shore, and up and down the river, and their tools gleamed in the sun a quarter of a mile from us, and we realized that boat-building was as ancient and honorable an art as agriculture, and that there might be a naval as well as a pastoral life. The whole history of commerce was made manifest in that scow turned bottom upward on the shore. Thus did men begin to go down upon the sea in ships; quaeque diu steterant in montibus altis, Fluctibus ignotis insultav[e]re carinae; "and keels which had long stood on high mountains careered insultingly (insultav[e]re) over unknown waves."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have passed down the river before sunrise on a summer morning, between fields of lilies still shut in sleep; and when, at length..., the flakes of sunlight from over the bank fell on the surface of the water, whole fields of white blossoms seemed to flash open before me, as I floated along, like the unfolding of a banner, so sensible is this flower to the influence of the sun's rays.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She, too, would now swim down the river of matrimony with a beautiful name, and a handle to it, as the owner of a fine family prop...erty. Women's rights was an excellent doctrine to preach, but for practice could not stand the strain of such temptation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pap always said it warn't no harm to borrow things, if you was meaning to pay them back, sometime; but the widow said it warn't an...ything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly right; so the best way would be for us to pick out two or three things from the list and say we wouldn't borrow them any more--then he reckoned it wouldn't be no harm to borrow the others. So we talked it over all one night, drifting on down the river, trying to make up our minds whether to drop the watermelons, or the cantelopes, or the mushmelons, or what. But toward daylight, we got it all settled satisfactory, and concluded to drop crabapples and p'simmons.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing could be more beautiful than our passage down the Hudson [River].... The change, the contrast, the ceaseless variety of be...auty, as you skim from side to side, the liquid smoothness of the broad mirror which reflects the scene, and most of all, the clear bright air through which you look at it; all this can only be seen and believed by crossing the Atlantic.... The magnificent boldness of the Jersey shore on the one side, and the luxurious softness of the shady lawns on the other, with the vast silvery stream that flows between them, altogether form a picture which may well excuse a traveller for saying, once and again, that the Hudson river can be surpassed in beauty by none on the outside of Paradise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We occasionally rested in the shade of a maple or a willow, and drew forth a melon for our refreshment, while we contemplated at o...ur leisure the lapse of the river and of human life; and as that current, with its floating twigs and leaves, so did all things pass in review before us, while far away in cities and marts on this very stream, the old routine was proceeding still. There is, indeed, a tide in the affairs of men, as the poet says, and yet as things flow they circulate, and the ebb always balances the flow. All streams are but tributary to the ocean, which itself does not stream, and the shores are unchanged, but in longer periods than man can measure. Go where we will, we discover infinite change in particulars only, not in generals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »