.ODkw.NTE3MQ

�Boston, November 12

Dear Mrs Eckstorm

I bow to the weight of analogies. I dallied with the Vineyard "Sanchacantucket" for a while. Tooker[?] gave me your definition for it. I give you a sketch [illustration on left side of page] of it - a salt water pond connected with the ocean by a narrow strip of water, which pours in and out with the tides. It is clearly, as he defined it, - at the bursting forth of the tidal stream. I tried to apply it to the Saco River with some disastrous results to Sohk[underlined] and Sauk[underlined] I recognize the application of this root to all the coastwise salt "rivers" - as Sawahquetock[?], the mouth of the Herring "River" in Harwich. I believe I have become aware that lo{?} the Indian was Poor in some words - among them "salt" - as far as Eliot could determine. Yet it is difficult to accept the notion that he had nothing to express the difference between fresh and salt water, with the ocean and the ponds on the coast that were fresh. Perhaps he just let it go at that, supposing us whites knew the difference - so, why worry.

Sawahquetock seems to answer for the Saco river and for the Herring Brook at Harwich - a noble stream seventy five miles long and a piffling salt water thread of perhaps a mile that neither knows when it is coming in or going out.

Since writing my Doctoral Thesis in Saco I came across an Indian place name at or near Stonington Conn. which has in it the element I thought could be inserted in our mangled Saco. It is Wegnetock - or Wequateqnock. If