In the row of buttonwood trees on the banks of the Merrimack in Haverhill, I saw that several had been cut down, probably because of their unsightly appearance, they all suffering from the prevalent disease which has attacked the buttonwood of late years, and one large one still resting on its stump where it had fallen. It seemed like a waste of timber or of fuel, but when I inquired about it, they answered that the millers did not like to saw it. Like other ornamental trees which have stood by the roadside for a hundred years, the inhabitants have been accustomed to fasten their horses to them, and have driven many spikes into them for this purpose. One man, having carried some buttonwood logs to mill, the miller agreed to saw them if he would make good the injury which might be done to his saw. The other agreed to it, but almost at the first clip they ran on to a spike and broke the saw, and the owner of the logs cried, “Stop!” he would have no more sawed. They are difficult to split, beside, and make poor timber at best, being very liable to warp. The “itinerary distance” between two points, a convenient expression. [Illustration: _Fair Haven Pond from the Cliffs_] Humboldt says, “It is still undetermined where life is most abundant: whether on the earth or in the fathomless depths of the ocean.” * * * * * It was a _mirage_, what in Sanscrit, according to Humboldt, is called “the thirst of the gazelle.” * * * * * Nothing memorable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood of mind. The heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their contemporaries dreamed of,—when they were in a frame of mind prepared in some measure for the truth. Referred to the world’s standard, the hero, the discoverer, is insane, its greatest men are all insane. At first the world does not respect its great men. Some rude and simple nations go to the other extreme and reverence all kinds of insanity. Humboldt says, speaking of Columbus approaching the New World: “The grateful coolness of the evening air, the ethereal purity of the starry firmament, the balmy fragrance of flowers, wafted to him by the land breeze, all led him to suppose (as we are told by Herrera, in the Decades (5)), that he was approaching the garden of Eden, the sacred abode of our first parents. The Orinoco seemed to him one of the four rivers which, according to the venerable tradition of the ancient world, flowed from Paradise, to water and divide the surface of the earth, newly adorned with plants.” Expeditions for the discovery of El Dorado, and also of the Fountain of Youth, led to real, though perhaps not compensatory, discoveries.[6] * * * * *