“What happens to me when I cross the Piscataqua and plunge rapidly into Maine at a cost of seventy-five cents in tolls? I cannot describe it. I do not ordinarily spy a partridge in a pear tree, or three French hens, but I do have the sensation of having received a gift from a true love. And when, five hours later, I dip down across the Narramissic and look back at the tiny town of Orland, the white spire of its church against the pale-red sky stirs me in a way that Chartres could never do. It was the Narramissic that once received as fine a lyrical tribute as was ever paid to a river—a line in a poem by a schoolboy, who wrote of it, ‘It flows through Orland every day.’ I never cross that mild stream without thinking of his testimonial to the constancy, the dependability of small, familiar rivers.”

E.B. White in “Home-Coming,’’ in Essays of E.B. White (1899-1985) (Harper & Row, 1977). He was a famed essayist and author of the children’s books Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. He and his wife had a small farm in Brooklin, Maine, on the Blue Hill Peninsula, first as a summer place and then mostly year-round.