Near the northern boundary of Massachusetts is the famous Merrimack River, flowing northeastward into the Atlantic, and noted for the enormous water-powers it provides for the various mill-towns that line its banks. It is a vigorous stream, having frequent waterfalls and carrying a powerful current, the name appropriately meaning "the swift water." Oliver Wendell Holmes writes of it in _The School Boy_: "Do pilgrims find their way to Indian Ridge, Or journey onward to the far-off bridge, And bring to younger ears the story back Of the broad stream, the mighty Merrimack?" The Merrimack drains the southern slopes of the White Mountains, and takes the outflow of Lake Winnipesaukee, a vast reservoir, the waters being regulated at its outlet to suit the wants of the mills below. It flows southward through New Hampshire into Massachusetts, turning northeast to the ocean. The river passes near Salisbury, where Daniel Webster was born in 1782; then, seventy-five miles northwest of Boston, comes to Concord, the capital of New Hampshire, which has a fine Capitol building and quarries of excellent granite; and eighteen miles below, it reaches Manchester, the chief city of New Hampshire, having sixty thousand people and many large mills owned by wealthy corporations. Here are the Amoskeag Falls (the Indian name meaning the "fishing-place"), the largest on the Merrimack, having fifty-five feet descent, and their water-power being utilized through two canals. The chief products are textile goods, locomotives and steam fire-engines. Eighteen miles farther southward the Nashua River comes up from the southwest, having passed the industrial town of Fitchburg on the way, and here at its confluence with the Merrimack is Nashua, another busy factory town. At Amherst, not far away, Horace Greeley was born in 1811. Crossing the boundary into Massachusetts, the river comes to the Pawtucket Falls, having thirty-two feet descent, and furnishing the water-power, twenty-six miles northwest of Boston, for the great mills of Lowell, the third city of Massachusetts, having a hundred thousand people, and spreading along the Merrimack at its confluence with Concord River, coming up from Concord Bridge of Revolutionary fame. The first mill was built at Lowell in 1823, and its industries have assumed a wide range and enormous output, though the operatives are nearly all French Canadians, and the language heard in this once Yankee mill-town is now mainly French. The Merrimack, having turned northeast, next comes to Lawrence, where it descends rapids of twenty-eight feet in the course of a half-mile. Here the Lawrence family, of which the noted Abbott Lawrence was the chief, established a town of cotton and woollen mills, utilizing the rapids by constructing a huge dam nine hundred feet long and thirty feet high, in 1845, at a cost of $250,000. Here are the great Pacific Mills, among the largest textile works in the world, and the city has over