they sped along past all their up-stream camping places, until they were passed through the locks at Lowell about noon, and launched upon the adverse but gentle current of the Concord. Up this they pressed with oar and sail, until, late in the evening of September 13, the boat "was grating against the bulrushes of its native port," somewhere near the mouth of the Mill Brook; and they drew it up and fastened it by its chain to the wild apple-tree, where it was easily reached from the "Parkman House," to which they hastened home.
When Hawthorne came, three years later, to dwell in the Old Manse, he wished for a boat for his excursions, and after John Thoreau's death, early in 1842, and Henry's departure for Staten Island in the spring of 1843, this adventurous but rather clumsy boat was turned over to Hawthorne and Ellery Channing. Thoreau thereafter made his river-voyages in a newer boat, which for a time he kept moored on Walden.
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