Perchance, After A
Few Thousands Of Years, If The Fishes Will Be Patient, And Pass
Their Summers Elsewhere, Meanwhile, Nature
Will have levelled the
Billerica dam, and the Lowell factories, and the Grass-ground
River run clear again, to be
Explored by new migratory shoals,
even as far as the Hopkinton pond and Westborough swamp.
One would like to know more of that race, now extinct, whose
seines lie rotting in the garrets of their children, who openly
professed the trade of fishermen, and even fed their townsmen
creditably, not skulking through the meadows to a rainy afternoon
sport. Dim visions we still get of miraculous draughts of fishes,
and heaps uncountable by the river-side, from the tales of our
seniors sent on horseback in their childhood from the neighboring
towns, perched on saddle-bags, with instructions to get the one
bag filled with shad, the other with alewives. At least one
memento of those days may still exist in the memory of this
generation, in the familiar appellation of a celebrated
train-band of this town, whose untrained ancestors stood
creditably at Concord North Bridge. Their captain, a man of
piscatory tastes, having duly warned his company to turn out on a
certain day, they, like obedient soldiers, appeared promptly on
parade at the appointed time, but, unfortunately, they went
undrilled, except in the manuoevres of a soldier's wit and
unlicensed jesting, that May day; for their captain, forgetting
his own appointment, and warned only by the favorable aspect of
the heavens, as he had often done before, went a-fishing that
afternoon, and his company thenceforth was known to old and
young, grave and gay, as "The Shad," and by the youths of this
vicinity this was long regarded as the proper name of all the
irregular militia in Christendom.
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