To cross again this valley, I would shudder and decline.
Roderick Lee was a miller, and as grist was hard to find
Down in his old New Hampshire,[76] he had little or naught to grind;
So, with his young wife blooming and his brown-eyed daughter Nell,
Together with two young farmers, he came to this[77] place to dwell:
And many’s the mile of prairie, and many’s the forest drear,
That lay ’twixt the far-off Merrimack[78] and the stream[79] that ripples here.
Yet with a heart as buoyant and as brave as it was true,
Young Lee, ’mid the cheers at parting, bade his native town adieu;
Then came the weeks of toiling, aye, months, ere the scorching plain