University of Virginia Library

LIFE IN THE OPEN AIR.
KATAHDIN AND THE PENOBSCOT.

1. CHAPTER I.
OFF.

At five P. M. we found ourselves — Iglesias, a
party of friends, and myself — on board the Isaac
Newton, a great, ugly, three-tiered box that walks
the North River, like a laboratory of greasy odors.

In this stately cinder-mill were American citizens.
Not to discuss spitting, which is for spittoons, not
literature, our fellow-travellers on the deck of the
“floating palace” were passably endurable people
in looks, style, and language. I dodge discrimination,
and characterize them en masse by negations.
The passengers of the Isaac Newton, on a certain
evening of July, 18—, were not so intrusively
green and so gasping as Britons, not so ill-dressed
and pretentious as Gauls, not so ardently futile and
so lubberly as Germans. Such were the negative
virtues of our fellow-citizen travellers; and base
would it be to exhibit their positive vices.

And so no more of passengers or passage. I
will not describe our evening on the river. Alas
for the duty of straightforwardness and dramatic

unity! Episodes seem so often sweeter than plots!
The wayside joys are better than the final successes;
the flowers along the vista, brighter than
the victor-wreaths at its close. I may not dally
on my way, turning to the right and the left for
beauty and caricature. I will balance on the strict
edge of my narrative, as a seventh-heavenward Mahometan,
with wine-forbidden steadiness of poise,
treads Al Seràt, his bridge of a sword-blade.

Next morning, at Albany, divergent trains cleft
our party into a better and a worser half. The
beautiful girls, our better half, fled westward to
ripen their pallid roses with richer summer-hues in
mosquitoless inland dells. Iglesias and I were still
northward bound.

At the Saratoga station we sipped a dreary, faded
reminiscence of former joys and sparkling brilliancy
long dead, in cups of Congress-water, brought by
unattractive Ganymedes and sold in the train, —
draughts flat, flabby, and utterly bubbleless, lukewarm
heel-taps with a flavor of savorless salt.

Still northward journeying, and feeling the seaside
moisture evaporate from our blood under inland
suns and sultry inland breezes, we came to
Lake Champlain.

As before banquets, to excite appetite, one takes
the gentle oyster, so we, before the serious pleasure
of our journey, tasted the Adirondack region, paradise
of Cockney sportsmen. There, through the
forest, the stag of ten trots, coquetting with greenhorns.
He likes the excitement of being shot at

and missed. He enjoys the smell of powder in a
battle where he is always safe. He hears Greenhorn
blundering through the woods, stopping to
growl at briers, stopping to revive his courage
with the Dutch supplement. The stag of ten
awaits his foe in a glade. The foe arrives, sees the
antlered monarch, and is panic-struck. He watches
him prance and strike the ground with his hoofs.
He slowly recovers heart, takes a pull at his flask,
rests his gun upon a log, and begins to study his
mark. The stag will not stand still. Greenhorn
is baffled. At last his target turns and carefully
exposes that region of his body where Greenhorn
has read lies the heart. Just about to fire, he
catches the eye of the stag winking futility into his
elaborate aim. His blunderbuss jerks upward. A
shower of cut leaves floats through the smoke,
from a tree thirty feet overhead. Then, with a
mild-eyed melancholy look of reproachful contempt,
the stag turns away, and wanders off to sleep in
quiet coverts far within the wood. He has fled,
while for Greenhorn no trophy remains. Antlers
have nodded to the sportsman; a short tail has
disappeared before his eyes; — he has seen something,
but has nothing to show. Whereupon he
buys a couple of pairs of ancient weather-bleached
horns from some colonist, and, nailing them up at
impossible angles on the wall of his city den, humbugs
brother-Cockneys with tales of vénerie, and has
for life his special legend, “How I shot my first deer
in the Adirondacks.”

The Adirondacks provide a compact, convenient,
accessible little wilderness, — an excellent field for
the experiments of tyros. When the tyro, whether
shot, fisherman, or forester, has proved himself
fully there, let him dislodge into some vaster
wilderness, away from guides by the day and
superintending hunters, away from the incursions
of the Cockney tribe, and let out the caged savage
within him for a tough struggle with Nature. It
needs a struggle tough and resolute to force that
Protean lady to observe at all her challenger.

It is well to go to the Adirondacks. They are
shaggy, and shagginess is a valuable trait. The
lakes are very well, — very well indeed. The objection
to the region is not the mountains, which
are reasonably shaggy, — not the lakes and rivers,
which are water, a capital element. The real difficulty
is the society: not the autochthonous society,
— they are worthy people, and it is hardly to be
mentioned as a fault that they are not a discriminating
race, and will asseverate that all fish are
trout, and the most arrant mutton is venison, —
but the immigrant, colonizing society. Cockneys
are to be found at every turn, flaunting their banners
of the awkward squad, proclaiming to the
world with protuberant pride that they are the
veritable backwoodsmen, — rather doing it, rather
astonishing the natives, they think. And so they
are. One squad of such neophytes might be entertaining;
but when every square mile echoes with
their hails, lost, poor babes, within a furlong of

their camps, and when the woods become dim and
the air civic with their cooking-smokes, and the
subtile odor of fried pork overpowers methylic
fragrance among the trees, then he who loves
forests for their solitude leaves these brethren to
their clumsy joys, and wanders elsewhere deeper
into sylvan scenes.

Our visit to the Adirondacks was episodic; and
as I have forsworn episodes, I turn away from them
with this mild slander, and strike again our Maine
track. With lips impurpled by the earliest huckle-berries,
we came out again upon Champlain. We
crossed that water-logged valley in a steamboat,
and hastened on, through a pleasant interlude of
our rough journey, across Vermont and New Hampshire,
two States not without interest to their residents,
but of none to this narrative.

By coach and wagon, by highway and by-way,
by horse-power and steam-power, we proceeded,
until it chanced, one August afternoon, that we
left railways and their regions at a wayside station,
and let our lingering feet march us along the valley
of the Upper Connecticut. This lovely river, baptizer
of Iglesias's childhood, was here shallow and
musical, half river, half brook; it had passed the
tinkling period, and plashed and rumbled voicefully
over rock and shallow.

It was a fair and verdant valley where we walked,
overlooked by hills of pleasant pastoral slope. All
the land was gay and ripe with yellow harvest.
Strolling along, as if the business of travel were

forgotten, we placidly identified ourselves with the
placid scenery. We became Arcadians both. Such
is Arcadia, if I have read aright: a realm where
sunshine never scorches, and yet shade is sweet;
where simple pleasures please; where the blue sky
and the bright water and the green fields satisfy
forever.

We were in lightest marching-trim. Iglesias
bore an umbrella, our armor against what heaven
could do with assault of sun or shower. I was
weaponed with a staff, should brute or biped uncourteous
dispute our way. We had no impediments
of “great trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and
bundle.” A thoughtful man hardly feels honest in
his life except as a pedestrian traveller. “La propriété
c'est le vol,” — which the West more briefly
expresses by calling baggage “plunder.” What
little plunder our indifferent honesty had packed
for this journey we had left with a certain stage-coachman,
perhaps to follow us, perhaps to become
his plunder. We were thus disconnected from
any depressing influence; we had no character to
sustain; we were heroes in disguise, and could
make our observations on life and manners without
being invited to a public hand-shaking, or to
exhibit feats in jugglery, for either of which a
traveller with plenteous portmanteaus, hair or
leather, must be prepared in villages thereabouts.
Totally unembarrassed, we lounged along or
leaped along, light-hearted. When the river neared
us, or winsome brooklet from the hill-side thwarted

our path, we stooped and lapped from their pools
of coolness, or tasted that most ethereal tipple,
the mingled air and water of electric bubbles, as
they slid brightly toward our lips.

The angle of the sun's rays grew less and less,
the wheat-fields were tinged more golden by the
clinging beams, our shadows lengthened, as if
exercise of an afternoon were stimulating to such
unreal essences. Finally the blue dells and gorges
of a wooded mountain, for two hours our landmark,
rose between us and the sun. But the sun's Parthian
arrows gave him a splendid triumph, more
signal for its evanescence. A storm was inevitable,
and sunset prepared a reconciling pageant.

Now, as may be supposed, Iglesias has an eye
for a sunset. That summer's crop had been very
short, and he had been some time on starvation-allowance
of cloudy magnificence. We therefore
halted by the road-side, and while I committed the
glory to memory, Iglesias intrusted his distincter
memorial to a sketch-book.

We were both busy, he repeating forms, noting
shades and tints, and I studying without pictorial
intent, when we heard a hail in the road below our
bank. It was New Hampshire, near the Maine
line, and near the spot where nasal organs are fabricated
that twang the roughest.

“Say!” shrieked up to us a freckled native,
holding fast to the tail of a calf, the last of a gambolling
family he was driving, — “Say! whodger
doon up thurr? Layn aoot taoonshup lains naoou,

aancher? Cauds ur suvvares raoond. Spekkleayshn
goan on, ur guess.”

We allowed this unmelodious vocalist to respect
us by permitting him to believe us surveyors in
another sense than as we were. One would not be
despised as an unpractical citizen, a mere looker
at Nature with no immediate view to profit, even
by a freckled calf-driver of the Upper Connecticut.
While we parleyed, the sketch was done, and the
pageant had faded quick before the storm.

Splendor had departed; the world in our neighborhood
had fallen into the unillumined dumps.
An ominous mournfulness, far sadder than the pensiveness
of twilight, drew over the sky. Clouds,
that donned brilliancy for the fond parting of mountain-tops
and the sun, now grew cheerless and
gray; their gay robes were taken from them, and
with bended heads they fled away from the sorrowful
wind. In western glooms beyond the world
a dreary gale had been born, and now came wailing
like one that for all his weariness may not rest, but
must go on harmful journeys and bear evil tidings.
With the vanguard gusts came volleys of rain, malicious
assaults, giving themselves the trouble to
tell us in an offensive way what we could discover
for ourselves, that a wetting impended and umbrellas
would soon be naught.

While the storm was thus nibbling before it bit,
we lengthened our strides to escape. Water, concentrated
in flow of stream or pause of lake, is
charming; not so to the shelterless is water diffused

in dash of deluge. Water, when we choose our
method of contact, is a friend; when it masters
us, it is a foe; when it drowns us or ducks us, a
very exasperating foe. Proud pedestrians become
very humble personages, when thoroughly vanquished
by a ducking deluge. A wetting takes out
the starch not only from garments, but the wearers
of them. Iglesias and I did not wish to stand all
the evening steaming before a kitchen-fire, inspecting
meanwhile culinary details: Phillis in the kitchen
is not always as fresh as Phillis in the field.
We therefore shook ourselves into full speed, and
bolted into our inn at Colebrook; and the rain, like
a portcullis, dropped solid behind us.

In town, the landlord is utterly merged in his
hotel. He is a sovereign rarely apparent. In the
country, the landlord is a personality. He is
greater than the house he keeps. Men arriving
inspect the master of the inn narrowly. If his
first glance is at the pocket, cheer will be bad; if
at the eyes or the lips, you need not take a cigar
before supper to keep down your appetite.

Our landlord was of the latter type. He surged
out of the little box where he was dispensing not
too fragrant rummers to a circle of village-politicians,
and congratulated us on our arrival before
the storm. He was a discriminating person. He
detected us at once, saw we were not tramps or
footpads, and led us to the parlor, a room attractively
furnished with a map of the United States
and an oblong music-book open at “Old Hundred.”

Our host further felicitated us that we had not
stopped at a certain tavern below, where, as he
said, —

“They cut a chunk er beef and drop 't into a
pot to bile, and bile her three days, and then don't
have noth'n' else for three weeks.”

He put his head out of the door and called, —

“George, go aoot and split up that 'ere wood as
fine as chaowder: these men 'll want their supper
right off.”

Drawing in his head, he continued to us confidentially,
—

“That 'ere George is jes' like a bird: he goes
off at one snappin'.”

Our host then rolled out toward the bar-room, to
discuss with his cronies who we might be. From
the window we perceived the birdlike George fly
and alight near the specified wood, which he proceeded
to bechowder. He brought in the result
of his handiwork, as smiling as a basket of chips.
Neat-handed Phillis at the door received the chowder,
and by its aid excited a sound and a smell,
both prophetic of supper. And we, willing to repose
after a sixteen-mile afternoon-walk, lounged
upon sofa or tilted in rocking-chair, taking the
available mental food, namely, “Godey's Lady's
Book” and the Almanac.

2. CHAPTER II.
GORMING AND GETTING ON.

Next morning it poured. The cinders before
the blacksmith's shop opposite had yielded their
black dye to the dismal puddles. The village cocks
were sadly draggled and discouraged, and cowered
under any shelter, shivering within their drowned
plumage. Who on such a morn would stir? Who
but the Patriot? Hardly had we breakfasted,
when he, the Patriot, waited upon us. It was a
Presidential campaign. They were starving in his
village for stump-speeches. Would the talking
man of our duo go over and feed their ears with a
fiery harangue? Patriot was determined to be
first with us; others were coming with similar
invitations; he was the early bird. Ah, those
portmanteaus! they had arrived, and betrayed us.

We would not be snapped up. We would wriggle
away. We were very sorry, but we must start
at once to pursue our journey.

“But it pours,” said Patriot.

“Patriot,” replied our talking member, “man is
flesh; and flesh, however sweet or savory it may
be, does not melt in water.”

Thus fairly committed to start, we immediately
opened negotiations for a carriage. “No go,”
was the first response of the coachman. Our willy
was met by his nilly. But we pointed out to him

that we could not stay there all a dismal day, —
that we must, would, could, should go. At last
we got within coachee's outworks. His nilly broke
down into shilly-shally. He began to state his objections;
then we knew he was ready to yield.
We combated him, clinking the supposed gold of
coppers in our pockets, or carelessly chucking a
tempting half-dollar at some fly on the ceiling. So
presently we prevailed, and he retired to make
ready.

By and by a degraded family-carriage came to
the door. It came by some feeble inertia left latent
in it by some former motive-power, rather than was
dragged up by its more degraded nags. A very
unwholesome coach. No doubt a successful quack-doctor
had used it in his prosperous days for his
wife and progeny; no doubt it had subsequently
become the property of a second-class undertaker,
and had conveyed many a quartette of cheap clergymen
to the funerals of poor relations whose
leaking sands of life left no gold-dust behind.
Such was our carriage for a rainy day.

The nags were of the huckleberry or flea-bitten
variety, — a freckled white. Perhaps the quack
had fed them with his refuse pills. These knobby-legged
unfortunates we of course named Xanthus
and Balius, not of podargous or swift-footed, but
podagrous or gouty race. Xanthus, like his Achillean
namesake, (vide Pope's Homer,)

Balius was in equally deplorable mood. Both seemed
more sensible to “Whoä” than to “Hadaap.” Podagrous
beasts, yet not stiffened to immobility.
Gayer steeds would have sundered the shackling
drag. These would never, by any gamesome caracoling,
endanger the coherency of pole with body,
of axle with wheel. From end to end the equipage
was congruous. Every part of the machine
was its weakest part, and that fact gave promise
of strength: an invalid never dies. Moreover,
the coach suited the day: the rusty was in harmony
with the dismal. It suited the damp, unpainted
houses, and the tumble-down blacksmith's-shop.
We contented ourselves with this artistic
propriety. We entered, treading cautiously. The
machine, with gentle spasms, got itself in motion,
and steered due east for Lake Umbagog. The
smiling landlord, the disappointed Patriot, and the
birdlike George waved us farewell.

Coachee was in the sulks. The rain beat upon
him, and we by purse-power had compelled him to
encounter discomfort. His self-respect must be
restored by superiority over somebody. He had
been beaten and must beat. He did so. His
horses took the lash until he felt at peace with
himself. Then half turning toward us, he made his
first remark.

“Them two hosses is gorming.”

“Yes,” we replied, “they do seem rather so.”

This was of course profound hypocrisy; but
“gorming” meant some bad quality, and any

might be safely predicated of our huckleberry pair.
Who will admit that he does not know all that is to
be known in horse-matters? We therefore asked
no questions, but waited patiently for information.

Delay pays demurrage to the wisely patient.
Coachee relapsed into the sulks. The driving rain
resolved itself into a dim chaos of mist. Xanthus
and Balius plodded on, but often paused and gasped,
or, turning their heads as if they missed something,
strayed from the track and drew us against
the dripping bushes. After one such excursion,
which had nearly been the ruin of us, and which
by calling out coachee's scourging powers had put
him thoroughly in good humor, he turned to us and
said, superlatively, —

“Them 's the gormingest hosses I ever see.
When I drew 'em in the four-hoss coach for
wheelers, they could keep a straight tail. Now
they act like they was drunk. They 's gorming,
— they won't do nothin' without a leader.”

To gorm, then, is to err when there is no leader.
Alas, how mankind gorms!

By sunless noon we were well among the mountains.
We came to the last New Hampshire
house, miles from its neighbors. But it was a self-sufficing
house, an epitome of humanity. Grandmamma,
bald under her cap, was seated by the
stove dandling grandchild, bald under its cap.
Each was highly entertained with the other. Grandpapa
was sandy with grandboy's gingerbread-crumbs.
The intervening ages were well represented

by wiry men and shrill women. The house,
also, without being tavern or shop, was an amateur
bazaar of vivers and goods. Anything one was
likely to want could be had there, — even a melodeon
and those inevitable Patent-Office Reports.
Here we descended, lunched, and providently
bought a general assortment, namely, a large plain
cake, five pounds of cheese, a ball of twine, and
two pairs of brown ribbed woollen socks, native
manufacture. My pair of these indestructibles
will outlast my last legs and go as an heirloom
after me.

The weather now, as we drove on, seemed to
think that Iglesias deserved better of it. Rain-globes
strung upon branches, each globe the possible
home of a sparkle, had waited long enough
unillumined. Sunlight suddenly discovered this
desponding patience and rewarded it. Every drop
selected its own ray from the liberal bundle, and,
crowding itself full of radiance, became a mirror
of sky and cloud and forest. Also, by the searching
sunbeams' store of regal purple, ripe raspberries
were betrayed. On these, magnified by their
convex lenses of water, we pounced. Showers
shook playfully upon us from the vines, while we
revelled in fruitiness. We ran before our gormers,
they gormed by us while we plucked, we ran by,
plucked again, and again were gormingly overtaken
and overtook. Thus we ate our way luxuriously
through the Dixville Notch, a capital cleft in a northern
spur of the White Mountains.

Picturesque is a curiously convenient, undiscriminating
epithet. I use it here. The Dixville Notch
is, briefly, picturesque, — a fine gorge between a
crumbling conical crag and a scarped precipice, —
a pass easily defensible, except at the season when
raspberries would distract sentinels.

Now we came upon our proper field of action.
We entered the State of Maine at Township Letter
B. A sharper harshness of articulation in stray
passengers told us that we were approaching the
vocal influence of the name Androscoggin. People
talked as if, instead of ivory ring or coral rattle to
develop their infantile teeth, they had bitten upon
pine knots. Voices were resinous and astringent.
An opera, with a chorus drummed up in those
regions, could dispense with violins.

Toward evening we struck the river, and found
it rasping and crackling over rocks as an Androscoggin
should. We passed the last hamlet, then
the last house but one, and finally drew up at the
last and northernmost house, near the lumbermen's
dam below Lake Umbagog. The damster, a stalwart
brown chieftain of the backwoodsman race,
received us with hearty hospitality. Xanthus and
Balius stumbled away on their homeward journey.
And after them the crazy coach went moaning: it
was not strong enough to creak or rattle.

Next day was rainy. It had, however, misty
intervals. In these we threw a fly for trout and
caught a chub in Androscoggin. Or, crouched on
the bank of a frog-pond, we tickled frogs with

straws. Yes, and fun of the freshest we found it.
Certain animals, and especially frogs, were created,
shaped, and educated to do the grotesque, that men
might study them, laugh, and grow fat. It was a
droll moment with Nature, when she entertained
herself and prepared entertainment for us by devising
the frog, that burlesque of bird, beast, and
man, and taught him how to move and how to
speak and sing. Iglesias and I did not disdain
batrachian studies, and set no limit to our merriment
at their quaint, solemn, half-human pranks.
One question still is unresolved, — Why do frogs
stay and be tickled? They snap snappishly at the
titillating straw; they snatch at it with their weird
little hands; they parry it skilfully. They hardly
can enjoy being tickled, and yet they endure, paying
a dear price for the society of their betters.
Frogs the frisky, frogs the spotted, were our
comedy that day. Whenever the rain ceased, we
rushed forth and tickled them, and thus vicariously
tickled ourselves into more than patience, into
jollity. So the day passed quickly.

3. CHAPTER III.
THE PINE-TREE.

While we were not tickling frogs, we were talking
lumber with the Umbagog damster. I had
already coasted Maine, piloted by Iglesias, and
knew the fisherman-life; now, under the same experienced
guidance, I was to study inland scenes,
and take lumbermen for my heroes.

Maine has two classes of warriors among its sons,
— fighters of forest and fighters of sea. Braves
must join one or the other army. The two are
close allies. Only by the aid of the woodmen can
the watermen build their engines of victory. The
seamen in return purvey the needful luxuries for
lumber-camps. Foresters float down timber that
seamen may build ships and go to the saccharine
islands of the South for molasses: for without
molasses no lumberman could be happy in the unsweetened
wilderness. Pork lubricates his joints;
molasses gives tenacity to his muscles.

Lumbering develops such men as Pindar saw
when he pictured Jason, his forest hero. Life is a
hearty and vigorous movement to them, not a
drooping slouch. Summer is their season of preparation;
winter, of the campaign; spring, of victory.
All over the north of the State, whatever is
not lake or river is forest. In summer, the Viewer,
like a military engineer, marks out the region, and

the spots of future attack. He views the woods;
and wherever a monarch tree crowns the leafy level,
he finds his way, and blazes a path. Not all trees
are worthy of the axe. Miles of lesser timber remain
untouched. A Maine forest after a lumber-campaign
is like France after a coup d'état: the
bourgeoisie are prosperous as ever, but the great
men are all gone.

While the viewer views, his followers are on
commissariat and quartermaster's service. They
are bringing up their provisions and fortifying their
camp. They build their log-station, pile up barrels
of pork, beans, and molasses, like mortars and
Paixhans in an arsenal, and are ready for a winter
of stout toil and solid jollity.

Stout is the toil, and the life seemingly dreary,
to those who cower by ingle-nooks or stand over
registers. But there is stirring excitement in this
bloodless war, and around plenteous camp-fires
vigor of merriment and hearty comradry. Men
who wield axes and breathe hard have lungs.
Blood aerated by the air that sings through the
pine-woods tingles in every fibre. Tingling blood
makes life joyous. Joy can hardly look without a
smile or speak without a laugh. And merry is the
evergreen-wood in electric winter.

Snows fall level in the sheltered, still forest.
Road-making is practicable. The region is already
channelled with watery ways. An imperial pine,
with its myriads of feet of future lumber, is worth
another path cut through the bush to the frozen

river-side. Down goes his Majesty Pinus I., three
half-centuries old, having reigned fifty years high
above all his race. A little fellow with a little
weapon has dethroned the quiet old king. Pinus I.
was very strong at bottom, but the little revolutionist
was stronger at top. Brains without much
trouble had their will of stolid matter. The tree
fallen, its branches are lopped, its purple trunk is
shortened into lengths. The teamster arrives with
oxen in full steam, and rimy with frozen breath
about their indignant nostrils. As he comes and
goes, he talks to his team for company; his conversation
is monotonous as the talk of lovers, but
it has a cheerful ring through the solitude. The
logs are chained and dragged creaking along over
the snow to the river-side. There the subdivisions
of Pinus the Great become a basis for a mighty
snow-mound. But the mild March winds blow
from seaward. Spring bourgeons. One day the
ice has gone. The river flows visible; and now
that its days of higher beauty and grace have come,
it climbs high up its banks to show that it is ready
for new usefulness. It would be dreary for the
great logs to see new verdure springing all around
them, while they lay idly rotting or sprouting with
uncouth funguses, not unsuspect of poison! But
they will not be wasted. Lumbermen, foes to idleness
and inutility, swarm again about their winter's
trophies. They imprint certain cabalistic tokens of
ownership on the logs, — crosses, xs, stars, crescents,
alphabetical letters, — marks respected all
along the rivers and lakes down to the boom where
the sticks are garnered for market. The marked
logs are tumbled into the brimming stream, and so
ends their forest-life.

Now comes “the great spring drive.” Maine
waters in spring flow under an illimitable raft.
Every camp contributes its myriads of brown cylinders
to the millions that go bobbing down rivers
with jaw-breaking names. And when the river
broadens to a lake, where these impetuous voyagers
might be stranded or miss their way and linger,
they are herded into vast rafts, and towed down
by boats, or by steam-tugs, if the lake is large as
Moosehead. At the lake-foot the rafts break up
and the logs travel again dispersedly down stream,
or through the “thoro'fare” connecting the members
of a chain of lakes. The hero of this epoch
is the Head-Driver. The head-driver of a timber-drive
leads a disorderly army, that will not obey
the word of command. Every log acts as an individual,
according to certain imperious laws of matter,
and every log is therefore at loggerheads with
every other log. The marshal must be in the thick
of the fight, keeping his forces well in hand, hurrying
stragglers, thrusting off the stranded, leading
his phalanxes wisely round curves and angles, lest
they be jammed and fill the river with a solid mass.
As the great sticks come dashing along, turning
porpoise-like somersets or leaping up twice their
length in the air, he must be everywhere, livelier
than a monkey in a mimosa, a wonder of acrobatic

agility in biggest boots. He made the proverb,
“As easy as falling off a log.”

Hardly less important is the Damster. To him
it falls to conserve the waters at a proper level.
At his dam, generally below a lake, the logs collect
and lie crowded. The river, with its obstacles
of rock and rapid, would anticipate wreck for
these timbers of future ships. Therefore, when
the spring drive is ready, and the head-driver is
armed with his jack-boots and his iron-pointed
sceptre, the damster opens his sluices and lets another
river flow through atop of the rock-shattered
river below. The logs of each proprietor, detected
by their marks, pay toll as they pass the gates
and rush bumptiously down the flood.

Far down, at some water-power nearest the reach
of tide, a boom checks the march of this formidable
body. The owners step forward and claim their
sticks. Dowse takes all marked with three crosses
and a dash. Sowse selects whatever bears two
crescents and a star. Rowse pokes about for his
stock, inscribed clip, dash, star, dash, clip. Nobody
has counterfeited these hieroglyphs. The
tale is complete. The logs go to the saw-mill.
Sawdust floats seaward. The lumbermen junket.
So ends the log-book.

“Maine,” said our host, the Damster of Umbagog,
“was made for lumbering-work. We never
could have got the trees out, without these lakes
and dams.”

4. CHAPTER IV.
UMBAGOG.

Rain ends, as even Noah and the Arkites discovered.
The new sensation of tickling frogs
could entertain us for one day; bounteous Nature
provided other novelties for the next. We were
at the Umbagog chain of lakes, and while it rained
the damster had purveyed us a boat and crew. At
sunrise he despatched us on our voyage. We
launched upon the Androscoggin, in a bateau of
the old Canadian type. Such light, clincher-built,
high-nosed, flat-bottomed boats are in use wherever
the fur-traders are or have been. Just such boats
navigate the Saskatchawan of the North, or Frazer's
River of the Northwest; and in a larger
counterpart of our Androscoggin bark I had three
years before floated down the magnificent Columbia
to Vancouver, bedded on bales of beaver-skins.

As soon as sunrise wrote itself in shadows over
the sparkling water, as soon as through the river-side
belt of gnarled arbor-vitæ sunbeams flickered,
we pushed off, rowed up-stream by a pair of stout
lumbermen. The river was a beautiful way, admitting
us into the penetralia of virgin forests. It
was not a rude wilderness: all that Northern
woods have of foliage, verdurous, slender, delicate,
tremulous, overhung our shadowy path, dense as
the vines that drape a tropic stream. Every giant

tree, every one of the Pinus oligarchy, had been
lumbered away: refined sylvan beauty remained.
The dam checked the river's turbulence, making it
slow and mirror-like. It merited a more melodious
name than harsh Androscoggin.

Five miles of such enchanting voyage brought
us to Lake Umbagog. Whiffs of mist had met us
in the outlet. Presently we opened chaos, and
chaos shut in upon us. There was no Umbagog to
be seen, — nothing but a few yards of gray water
and a world of gray vapor. Therefore I cannot
criticise, nor insult, nor compliment Umbagog.
Let us deem it beautiful. The sun tried at the fog,
to lift it with leverage of his early level beams.
Failing in this attempt to stir and heave away the
mass, he climbed, and began to use his beams as
wedges, driving them down more perpendicularly.
Whenever this industrious craftsman made a successful
split, the fog gaped, and we could see for a
moment, indefinitely, an expanse of water, hedged
with gloomy forest, and owning for its dominant
height a wild mountain, Aziscohos, or, briefer, Esquihos.

But the fog was still too dense to be riven by
slanting sunbeams. It closed again in solider phalanx.
Our gray cell shut close about us. Esquihos
and the distance became nowhere. In fact, ourselves
would have been nowhere, except that a
sluggish damp wind puffed sometimes, and, steering
into this, we could guide our way within a few
points of our course.

Any traveller knows that it is no very crushing
disappointment not to see what he came to see.
Outside sights give something, but inside joys are
independent. We enjoyed our dim damp voyage
heartily, on that wide loneliness. Nor were our
shouts and laughter the only sounds. Loons would
sometimes wail to us, as they dived, black dots in
the mist. Then we would wait for their bulbous
reappearance, and let fly the futile shot with its
muffled report, — missing, of course.

No being has ever shot a loon, though several
have legends of some one who has. Sound has no
power to express a profounder emotion of utter
loneliness than the loon's cry. Standing in piny
darkness on the lake's bank, or floating in dimness
of mist or glimmer of twilight on its surface, you
hear this wailing note, and all possibility of human
tenancy by the shore or human voyaging is annihilated.
You can fancy no response to this signal
of solitude disturbed, and again it comes sadly
over the water, the despairing plaint of some companionless
and incomplete existence, exiled from
happiness it has never known, and conscious only
of blank and utter want. Loon-skins have a commercial
value; so it is reported. The Barabinzians
of Siberia, a nation “up beyond the River Ob,”
tan them into water-proof paletots or aquascutums.
How they catch their loon, before they skin their
loon, is one of the mysteries of that unknown
realm.

Og, Gog, Magog, Memphremagog, all agog,

Umbagog, — certainly the American Indians were
the Lost Tribes, and conserved the old familiar
syllables in their new home.

Rowing into the damp breeze, we by and by
traversed the lake. We had gained nothing but
a fact of distance. But here was to be an interlude
of interest. The “thoro'fare” linking Umbagog
to its next neighbor is no thoro'fare for a
bateau, since a bateau cannot climb through breakers
over boulders. We must make a “carry,” an
actual portage, such as in all chronicles of pioneer
voyages strike like the excitement of rapids into
the monotonous course of easy descent. Another
boat was ready on the next lake, but our chattels
must go three miles through the woods. Yes, we
now were to achieve a portage. Consider it, blasé
friend, — was not this sensation alone worth the
trip?

The worthy lumbermen, and our supernumerary,
the damster's son, staggered along slowly with
our traps. Iglesias and I, having nothing to carry,
enjoyed the carry. We lounged along through the
glades, now sunny for the moment, and dallied
with raspberries and blueberries, finer than any
ever seen. The latter henceforth began to impurple
our blood. Maine is lusciously carpeted
with them.

As we oozed along the overgrown trail, dripping
still with last night's rain, drops would alight
upon our necks and trickle down our backs. A
wet spine excites hunger, — if a pedestrian on a

portage, after voyaging from sunrise, needs any
appetizer when his shadow marks noon. We
halted, fired up, and lunched vigorously on toasted
pork and trimmings. As pork must be the Omega
in forest-fare, it is well to make it the Alpha. Fate
thus becomes choice. Citizens uneducated to forest-life
with much pains transport into the woods
sealed cans of what they deem will dainties be, and
scoff at woodsmen frizzling slices of pork on a
pointed stick. But Experience does not disdain a
Cockney. She broods over him, and will by and by
hatch him into a full-fledged forester. After such
incubation, he will recognize his natural food, and
compactest fuel for the lamp of life. He will take
to his pork like mother's milk.

Our dessert of raspberries grew all along the
path, and lured us on to a log-station by the water,
where we found another bateau ready to transport
us over Lakes Weelocksebacook, Allegundabagog,
and Mollychunkamug. Doubters may smile and
smile at these names, but they are geography.

We do not commit ourselves to further judgment
upon the first, than that it is doubtless worthy of its
name. My own opinion is, that the scenery felt
that it was dullish, and was ashamed to “exhibit”
to Iglesias; if he pronounced a condemnation, Umbagog
and its sisters feared that they would be degraded
to fish-ponds merely. Therefore they veiled
themselves. Mists hung low over the leaden waters,
and blacker clouds crushed the pine-dark hills.

A fair curve of sandy beach separates Weelocksebacook

from its neighbor. There is buried one
Melattach, an Indian chief. Of course there has
been found in Maine some one irreverent enough to
trot a lame Pegasus over this grave, and accuse the
frowzy old red-skin of Christian virtues and delicate
romance.

There were no portages this afternoon. We took
the three lakes at easy speed, persuading ourselves
that scenes fog would not let us see were unscenic.
It is well that a man should think what he cannot
get unworthy of his getting. As evening came,
the sun made another effort, with the aid of west
winds, at the mist. The sun cleft, the breeze
drove. Suddenly the battle was done, victory
easily gained. We were cheered by a gush of
level sunlight. Even the dull, gray vapor became
a transfigured and beautiful essence. Dull and
uniform it had hung over the land; now the plastic
winds quarried it, and shaped the whole mass into
individuals, each with its character. To the cloud-forms
modelled out of formlessness the winds gave
life of motion, sunshine gave life of light, and they
hastened through the lower atmosphere, or sailed
lingering across the blue breadths of mid-heaven,
or dwelt peacefully aloft in the region of the cirri;
and whether trailing gauzy robes in flight, or
moving stately, or dwelling on high where scope
of vision makes travel needless, they were still the
brightest, the gracefullest, the purest beings that
Earth creates for man's most delicate pleasure.

When it cleared, — when it purveyed us a broadening

zone of blue sky and a heavenful of brilliant
cloud-creatures, we were sailing over Lake Mollychunkamug.
Fair Mollychunkamug had not smiled
for us until now; — now a sunny grin spread over
her smooth cheeks. She was all smiling, and presently,
as the breeze dimpled her, all a “snicker”
up into the roots of her hair, up among her foresttresses.
Mollychunkamug! Who could be aught
but gay, gay even to the farcical, when on such a
name? Is it Indian? Bewildered Indian we deem
it, — transmogrified somewhat from aboriginal sound
by the fond imagination of some lumberman, finding
in it a sweet memorial of his Mary far away in
the kitchens of the Kennebec, his Mary so rotund
of blooming cheek, his Molly of the chunky mug.
To him who truly loves, all Nature is filled with
Amaryllidian echoes. Every sight and every sound
recalls her who need not be recalled, to a heart that
has never dislodged her.

We lingered over our interview with Mollychunkamug.
She may not be numbered among
the great beauties of the world; nevertheless, she
is an attractive squaw, — a very honest bit of flat-faced
prettiness in the wilderness.

Above Mollychunkamug is Moosetocmaguntic
Lake. Another innavigable thoro'fare unites them.
A dam of Titanic crib-work, fifteen hundred feet
long, confines the upper waters. Near this we
disembarked. We balanced ourselves along the
timbers of the dam, and reached a huge log-cabin
at its farther end.

Mr. Killgrove, the damster, came forth and
offered us the freedom of his settlement in a tobacco-box.
Tobacco is hospitality in the compactest
form. Civilization has determined that tobacco,
especially in the shape of smoke, is essential
as food, water, or air. The pipe is everywhere
the pipe of peace. Peace, then, and anodyne-repose,
after a day of travel, were offered us by the
friendly damster.

A squad of lumbermen were our new fellow-citizens.
These soldiers of the outermost outpost
were in the regulation-uniform, — red-flannel shirts
impurpled by wetting, big boots, and old felt-hats.
Blood-red is the true soldierly color. All the residents
of Damville dwelt in a great log-barrack,
the Hôtel-de-Ville. Its architecture was of the
early American style, and possessed the high art
of simplicity. It was solid, not gingerbreadesque.
Primeval American art has a rude dignity, far better
than the sham splendors of our mediæval and
transition period.

Our new friends, luxurious fellows, had been
favored by Fate with a French-Canadian cook, himself
a Three of Frères Provinciaux. Such was his
reputation. We saw by the eye of him, and by
his nose, formed for comprehending fragrances,
and by the lines of refined taste converging from
his whole face toward his mouth, that he was one
to detect and sniff gastronomic possibilities in the
humblest materials. Joseph Bourgogne looked
the cook. His phiz gave us faith in him: eyes

small and discriminating; nose upturned, nostrils
expanded and receptive; mouth saucy in the literal
sense. His voice, moreover, was a cook's, —
thick in articulation, dulcet in tone. He spoke as
if he deemed that a throat was created for better
uses than laboriously manufacturing words, — as
if the object of a mouth were to receive tribute,
not to give commands, — as if that pink stalactite,
his palate, were more used by delicacies entering,
than by rough words or sorry sighs going out of
the inner caverns.

When we find the right man in the right place,
our minds are at ease. The future becomes satisfactory
as the past. Anticipation is glad certainty,
not anxious doubt. Trusting our gastronomic
welfare fully to this great artist, we tried for fish
below the dam. Only petty fishlings, weighing
ounces, took the bit between their teeth. We
therefore doffed the fisherman and donned the artist
and poet, and chased our own fancies down the
dark whirlpooling river, along its dell of evergreens,
now lurid with the last glows of twilight.
Iglesias and I continued dreamily gazing down the
thoro'fare toward Mollychunkamug only a certain
length of time. Man keeps up to his highest
elations hardly longer than a danseuse can poise in
a pose. To be conscious of the highest beauty
demands an involuntary intentness of observation
so fanatically eager that presently we are prostrated
and need stimulants. And just as we sensitively
felt this exhaustion and this need, we heard

a suggestive voice calling us from the front-door
of the mansion-house of Damville, and “Supper”
was the cry.

A call to the table may quell and may awaken
romance. When, in some abode of poetized
luxury, the “silver knell” sounds musically six,
and a door opens toward a glitter that is not pewter
and Wedgewood, and, with a being fair and
changeful as a sunset cloud upon my arm, I move
under the archway of blue curtains toward the
asphodel and the nectar, then, O Reader! O Friend!
romance crowds into my heart, as color and fragrance
crowd into a rose-bud. Joseph Bourgogne,
cook at Damville on Moosetocmaguntic, could not
offer us such substitute for æsthetic emotions. But
his voice of an artist created a winning picture
half veiled with mists, evanescent and affectionate,
such as linger fondly over Pork-and-Beans.

Fancied joy soon to become fact. We entered
the barrack. Beneath its smoky roof-tree was a
pervading aroma; near the centre of that aroma,
a table dim with wefts of incense; at the innermost
centre of that aroma and that incense,
and whence those visible and viewless fountains
streamed, was their source, — a Dish of Pork-and-Beans.

Topmostly this. There were lesser viands, buttresses
to this towering triumph. Minor smokes
from minor censers. A circle of little craterlings
about the great crater, — of little fiery cones about
that great volcanic dome in the midst, unopened,

but bursting with bounty. We sat down, and
one of the red-shirted boldly crushed the smoking
dome. The brave fellow plunged in with a spoon
and heaped our plates.

A priori we had deduced Joseph Bourgogne's
results from inspection of Joseph. Now we could
reason back from one experimentum crucis cooked
by him. Effect and cause were worthy of each
other.

The average world must be revenged upon Genius.
Greatness must be punished by itself or
another. Joseph Bourgogne was no exception to
the laws of the misery of Genius. He had a distressing
trait, whose exhibition tickled the dura
ilia of the reapers of the forest. Joseph, poet-cook,
was sensitive to new ideas. This sensitiveness
to the peremptory thought made him the
slave of the wags of Damville. Whenever he had
anything in his hands, at a stern, quick command
he would drop it nervously. Did he approach the
table with a second dish of pork-and-beans, a yellow
dish of beans, browned delicately as a Sèvres vase,
then would some full-fed rogue, waiting until Joseph
was bending over some devoted head, say
sharply, “Drop that, Joseph!” — whereupon down
went dish and contents, emporridging the poll and
person of the luckless wight beneath. Always,
were his burden pitcher of water, armful of wood,
axe dangerous to toes, mirror, or pudding, still
followed the same result. And when the poet-cook
had done the mischief, he would stand shuddering

at his work of ruin, and sigh, and curse his too
sensitive nature.

In honor of us, the damster kept order. Joseph
disturbed the banquet only by entering with new
triumphs of Art. Last came a climax-pie, — contents
unknown. And when that dish, fit to set
before a king, was opened, the poem of our supper
was complete. J. B. sailed to the Parnassus
where Ude and Vattel feast, forever cooking immortal
banquets in star-lighted spheres.

Then we sat in the picturesque dimness of the
lofty cabin, under the void where the roof shut off
the stars, and talked of the pine-woods, of logging,
measuring, and spring-drives, and of moose-hunting
on snow-shoes, until our mouths had a wild
flavor more spicy than if we had chewed spruce-gum
by the hour. Spruce-gum is the aboriginal
quid of these regions. Foresters chew this tenacious
morsel as tars nibble at a bit of oakum,
grooms at a straw, Southerns at tobacco, or
school-girls at a slate-pencil.

The barrack was fitted up with bunks. Iglesias
rolled into one of these. I mummied myself in my
blankets and did penance upon a bench. Pineknots
in my pallet sought out my tenderest spots.
The softer wood was worn away about these projections.
Hillocky was the surface, so that I beat
about uneasily and awoke often, ready to envy
Iglesias. But from him, also, I heard sounds of
struggling.

5. CHAPTER V.
UP THE LAKES.

Mr. Killgrove, slayer of forests, became the
pilot of our voyage up Lake Moosetocmaguntic.
We shoved off in a bateau, while Joseph Bourgogne,
sad at losing us, stood among the stumps,
waving adieux with a dish-clout. We had solaced
his soul with meed of praise. And now, alas! we
left him to the rude jokes and half-sympathies of
the lumbermen. The artist-cook saw his appreciators
vanish away, and his proud dish-clout drooped
like a defeated banner.

“A fine lake,” remarked Iglesias, instituting the
matutinal conversation in a safe and general way.

“Yes,” returned Mr. Killgrove, “when you
come to get seven or eight feet more of water atop
of this in spring, it is considerable of a puddle.”

Our weather seemed to be now bettering with
more resolution. Many days had passed since Aurora
had shown herself, — many days since the
rising sun and the world had seen each other. But
yesterday this sulky estrangement ended, and, after
the beautiful reconciliation at sunset, the faint mists
of doubt in their brief parting for a night had now
no power against the ardors of anticipated meeting.
As we shot out upon the steaming water, the sun
was just looking over the lower ridges of a mountain
opposite. Air, blue and quivering, hung under

shelter of the mountain-front, as if a film from the
dim purple of night were hiding there to see what
beauty day had, better than its own. The gray fog,
so dreary for three mornings, was utterly vanquished;
all was vanished, save where “swimming
vapors sloped athwart the glen,” and “crept from
pine to pine.” These had dallied, like spies of a
flying army, to watch for chances of its return;
but they, too, carried away by the enthusiasms of
a world liberated and illumined, changed their allegiance,
joined the party of hope and progress, and
added the grace of their presence to the fair pageant
of a better day.

Lake Moosetocmaguntic is good, — above the
average. If its name had but two syllables, and
the thing named were near Somewhere, poetry and
rhetoric would celebrate it, and the world would
be prouder of itself for another “gem.” Now nobody
sees it, and those who do have had their anticipations
lengthened leagues by every syllable
of its sesquipedalian title. One expects, perhaps,
something more than what he finds. He finds a
good average sheet of water, set in a circlet of
dark forest, — forests sloping up to wooded hills,
and these to wooded mountains. Very good and
satisfactory elements, and worth notice, — especially
when the artistic eye is also a fisherman's eye,
and he detects fishy spots. As to wilderness, there
can be none more complete. At the upper end of
the lake is a trace of humanity in a deserted cabin
on a small clearing. There a hermit pair once

lived, — man and wife, utterly alone for fifteen
years, — once or twice a year, perhaps, visited by
lumbermen. Fifteen years alone with a wife! a
trial, certainly, — not necessarily in the desponding
sense of the word; not as Yankees have it, making
trial a misfortune, but a test.

Mr. Killgrove entertained us with resinous-flavored
talk. The voyage was unexcitingly pleasant.
We passed an archipelago of scrubby islands,
and, turning away from a blue vista of hills northward,
entered a lovely curve of river richly overhung
with arbor-vitæ, a shadowy quiet reach of
clear water, crowded below its beautiful surface
with reflected forest and reflected sky.

“Iglesias,” said I, “we divined how Mollychunkamug
had its name; now, as to Moosetocmaguntic,
— whence that elongated appellative?”

“It was named,” replied Iglesias, “from the adventure
of a certain hunter in these regions. He
was moose-hunting here in days gone by. His tale
runs thus: — `I had been four days without game,
and naturally without anything to eat except pinecones
and green chestnuts. There was no game in
the forest. The trout would not bite, for I had no
tackle and no hook. I was starving. I sat me
down, and rested my trusty but futile rifle against
a fallen tree. Suddenly I heard a tread, turned my
head, saw a Moose, — took — my — gun, — tick!
he was dead. I was saved. I feasted, and in gratitude
named the lake Moosetookmyguntick.' Geography
has modified it, but the name cannot be
misunderstood.”

We glided up the fair river, and presently came
to the hut of Mr. Smith, fisherman and misogynist.
And there is little more to be said about Mr. Smith.
He appears in this chronicle because he owned a
boat which became our vehicle on Lake Oquossok,
Aquessok, Lakewocket, or Rangeley. Mr. Smith
guided us across the carry to the next of the chain
of lakes, and embarked us in a crazy skiff. It was
blowing fresh, and, not to be wrecked, we coasted
close to the gnarled arbor-vitæ thickets. Smith
sogered along, drawling dull legends of trout-fishing.

“Drefful notional critturs traout be,” he said, —
“olluz bitin' at whodger haänt got. Orful contrairy
critturs, — jess like fimmls. Yer can cotch
a fimml with a feather, ef she 's ter be cotched; ef
she haänt ter be cotched, yer may scoop ther hul
world dry an' yer haänt got her. Jess so traout.”

The misogynist bored us with his dull philosophy.
The buffetings of inland waves were not
only insulting, but dangerous, to our leaky punt.
At any moment, Iglesias and I might find ourselves
floundering together in thin fresh water.
Joyfully, therefore, at last, did we discern clearings,
culture, and habitations at the lake-head.
There was no tavernous village of Rangeley; that
would have been too great a contrast, after the forest
and the lakes, where loons are the only disturbers
of silence, — incongruity enough to overpower
utterly the ringing of woodland music in our
hearts. Rangeley was a townless township, as

the outermost township should be. We had,
however, learnt from Killgrove, feller of forests,
that there was a certain farmer on the lake, one
of the chieftains of that realm, who would hospitably
entertain us. Smith, wheedler of trout,
landed us in quite an ambitious foamy surf at the
foot of a declivity below our future host's farm.

We had now traversed Lakes Umbagog, Weelocksebacook,
Allegundabagog, Mollychunkamug,
Moosetocmaguntic, and Oquossok.

We had been compelled to pronounce these
names constantly. Of course our vocal organs
were distorted. Of course our vocal nervous systems
were shattered, and we had a chronic lameness
of the jaws. We therefore recognized a
peculiar appropriateness in the name of our host.

Toothaker was his name. He dwelt upon the
lawn-like bank, a hundred feet above the lake.
Mr. Toothaker himself was absent, but his wife
received us hospitably, disposed us in her guest-chamber,
and gratified us with a supper.

This was Rangeley Township, the outer settlement
on the west side of Maine. A “squire”
from England gave it his name. He bought the
tract, named it, inhabited several years, a popular
squire-arch, and then returned from the wild to
the tame, from pine woods and stumpy fields to
the elm-planted hedge-rows and shaven lawns of
placid England. The local gossip did not reveal
any cause for Mr. Rangeley's fondness for contrasts
and exile.

Mr. Toothaker has been a careful dentist to the
stumps of his farm. It is beautifully stumpless,
and slopes verdantly, or varied with yellow harvest,
down to the lake and up to the forest primeval.
He has preserved a pretty grove of birch
and maple as shelter, ornament, partridge-cover,
and perpendicular wood-pile. Below his house
and barns is the lovely oval of the lake, seen
across the fair fields, bright with wheat, or green
with pasture. A road, hedged with briskly-aspiring
young spruces, runs for a mile northward,
making a faint show at attacking the wilderness.
A mile's loneliness is enough for this unsupported
pioneer; he runs up a tree, sees nothing but dark
woods, thinks of Labrador and the North Pole,
and stops.

Next morning, Mr. Toothaker returned from a
political meeting below among the towns. It was
the Presidential campaign, — stirring days from
pines to prairies, stirring days from codfish to
cocoa-nuts. Tonguey men were talking from every
stump all over the land. Blatant patriots were
heard, wherever a flock of compatriots could be
persuaded to listen. The man with one speech
containing two stories was making the tour of all
the villages. The man with two speeches, each
with three stories, one of them very broad indeed,
was in request for the towns. The oratorical
Stentorian man, with inexhaustible rivers of speech
and rafts of stories, was in full torrent at mass-meetings.
There was no neighborhood that might

not see and hear an M. C. But Rangeley had
been the minus town, and by all the speech-makers
really neglected; there was danger that its voters
must deposit their ballots according to their own
judgment, without any advice from strangers.
This, of course, would never do. Mr. Toothaker
found that we fraternized in politics. He called
upon us, as patriots, to become the orators of
the day. Why not? Except that these seldom
houses do not promise an exhilarating crowd. We
promised, however, that, if he would supply hearers,
we between us would find a speaker.

Mr. Toothaker called a nephew, and charged
him to boot and saddle, and flame it through the
country-side that two “Men from New York”
were there, and would give a “Lecture on Politics,”
at the Red School-house, at five that evening.

And to the Red School-house, at five, crowded
the men, ay, and the women and children, of
Rangeley and thereabout. They came as the winds
and waves come when forests and navies are rended
and stranded. Horse, foot, and charioteers, they
thronged toward the rubicund fountain of education.
From houses that lurked invisible in clearings
suddenly burst forth a population, an audience
ardent with patriotism, eager for politics even from
a Cockney interpreter, and numerous enough to
stir electricity in a speaker's mind. Some of the
matrons brought bundles of swaddled infants, to be
early instructed in good citizenship; but too often

these young patriots were found to have but crude
notions on the subject of applause, and they were
ignominiously removed, fighting violently for their
privilege of free speech, doubling their unterrified
fists, and getting as red in the face as the school-house.

Mr. Toothaker, in a neat speech, introduced the
orator, who took his stand in the schoolmaster's
pulpit, and surveyed his stalwart and gentle hearers,
filling the sloping benches and overflowing out-of-doors.
Gaffer and gammer, man and maiden,
were distributed, the ladies to the right of the
aisle, the gentlemen to the left. They must not
be in contact, — perhaps because gaffer will gossip
with gammer, and youth and maid will toy. Dignity
demanded that they should be distinct as the
conservative Right and radical Left of a French
Assembly. Convenient, this, for the orator; since
thus his things of beauty, joys forever, he could
waft, in dulcet tones, over to the ladies' side, and
his things of logic, tough morsels for life-long
digestion, he could jerk, like bolts from an arbalist,
over at the open mouths of gray gaffer and robust
man.

I am not about to report the orator's speech.
Stealing another's thunder is an offence punishable
condignly ever since the days of Salmoneus.
Perhaps, too, he may wish to use the same eloquent
bits in the present Olympiad; for American life is
measured by Olympiads, signalized by nobler contests
than the petty states of Greece ever knew.

The people of Rangeley disappeared as mysteriously
as they had emerged from the woods, having
had their share of the good or bad talk of
that year of freedom. If political harangues educate,
the educated class was largely recruited
that summer.

Next day, again, was stormy. We stayed quietly
under shelter, preparing for our real journey
after so much prelude. The Isaac Newton's
steam-whistle had sent up the curtain; the overture
had followed with strains Der-Freischutzy in
the Adirondacks, pastoral in the valleys of Vermont
and New Hampshire, funebral and andante
in the fogs of Mollychunkamug; now it was to
end in an allegretto gallopade, and the drama
would open.

At last the sun shone bright upon the silky ripples
of the lake. Mr. Toothaker provided two
buggies, — one for himself and our traps, one for
Iglesias and me. We rattled away across county
and county. And so at full speed we drove all
day, and, with a few hours' halt, all night, — all a
fresh, starry night, — until gay sunrise brought us
to Skowhegan, on the road to Moosehead Lake.

As we had travelled all night, breakfast must be
our substitute for slumber. Repletion, instead of
repose, must restore us. Two files of red-shirted
lumbermen, brandishing knives at each other across
a long table, only excited us to livelier gymnastics;
and when we had thus hastily crammed what they
call in Maine beefsteak, and what they infuse down

East for coffee, we climbed to the top of a coach
of the bounding-billow motion, and went pitching
northward.

Two facts we learned from our coachman: one,
that we were passing that day through a “pretty
sassy country”; also, that the same region was
“only meant to hold the world together.” Personal
“sassiness” is a trait of which every Yankee
is proud; Iglesias and I both venture to hope
that we appreciate the value of that quality, and
have properly cultivated it. Topographical “sassiness,”
unmodified by culture and control, is a
rude, rugged, and unattractive trait; and New
England is, on the whole, “sassier” than I could
wish. Let the dullish day's drive, then, be passed
over dumbly. In the evening we dismounted at
Greenville, at the foot of Moosehead Lake.

6. CHAPTER VI.
THE BIRCH.

The rivers of Maine, as a native observed to me,
“olluz spread 'mselves inter bulges.” Mollychunkamug
and her fellows are the bulges of
the Androscoggin; Moosehead, of the Kennebec.
Sluggish streams do not need such pauses. Peace
is thrown away upon stolidity. The torrents of

Maine are hasty young heroes, galloping so hard
when they gallop, and charging with such rash
enthusiasm when they charge, hurrying with such
Achillean ardor toward their eternity of ocean,
that they would never know the influence, in their
heart of hearts, of blue cloudlessness, or the glory
of noonday, or the pageantries of sunset, — they
would only tear and rive and shatter carelessly.
Nature, therefore, provides valleys for the streams
to bulge in, and entertain celestial reflections.

Nature, arranging lake-spots as educational episodes
for the Maine rivers, disposes them also with
a view to utility. Mr. Killgrove and his fellow-lumbermen
treat lakes as log-puddles and raft-depots.
Moosehead is the most important of these,
and keeps a steamboat for tugging rafts and transporting
raftsmen.

Moosehead also provides vessels far dearer to
the heart of the adventurous than anything driven
by steam. Here, mayhap, will an untravelled traveller
make his first acquaintance with the birch-bark
canoe, and learn to call it by the affectionate
diminutive, “Birch.” Earlier in life there was
no love lost between him and whatever bore that
name. Even now, if the untravelled one's first
acquaintance be not distinguished by an unlovely
ducking, so much the worse. The ducking must
come. Caution must be learnt by catastrophe.
No one can ever know how unstable a thing is
a birch canoe, unless he has felt it slide away from
under his misplaced feet. Novices should take

nude practice in empty birches, lest they spill
themselves and the load of full ones, — a wondrous
easy thing to do.

A birch canoe is the right thing in the right
place. Maine's rivers are violently impulsive and
spasmodic in their running. Sometimes you have
a foamy rapid, sometimes a broad shoal, sometimes
a barricade of boulders with gleams of white water
springing through or leaping over its rocks. Your
boat for voyaging here must be stout enough to
buffet the rapid, light enough to skim the shallow,
agile enough to vault over, or lithe enough to slip
through, the barricade. Besides, sometimes the
barricade becomes a compact wall, — a baffler, unless
boat and boatmen can circumvent it, — unless
the nautical carriage can itself be carried about the
obstacle, — can be picked up, shouldered, and made
off with.

A birch meets all these demands. It lies, light
as a leaf, on whirlpooling surfaces. A tip of the
paddle can turn it into the eddy beside the breaker.
A check of the setting-pole can hold it steadfast
on the brink of wreck. Where there is water
enough to varnish the pebbles, there it will glide.
A birch thirty feet long, big enough for a trio
and their traps, weighs only seventy-five pounds.
When the rapid passes into a cataract, when the
wall of rock across the stream is impregnable in
front, it can be taken in the flank by an amphibious
birch. The navigator lifts his canoe out of water
and bonnets himself with it. He wears it on head

and shoulders, around the impassable spot. Below
the rough water, he gets into his elongated chapeau
and floats away. Without such vessel, agile,
elastic, imponderable, and transmutable, Androscoggin,
Kennebec, and Penobscot would be no
thoro'fares for human beings. Musquash might
dabble, chips might drift, logs might turn somersets
along their lonely currents; but never voyager,
gentle or bold, could speed through brilliant
perils, gladdening the wilderness with shout and
song.

Maine's rivers must have birch canoes; Maine's
woods, of course, therefore, provide birches. The
white-birch, paper-birch, canoe-birch, grows large
in moist spots near the stream where it is needed.
Seen by the flicker of a camp-fire at night, they
surround the intrusive traveller like ghosts of
giant sentinels. Once, Indian tribes with names
that “nobody can speak and nobody can spell”
roamed these forests. A stouter second growth
of humanity has ousted them, save a few seedy
ones who gad about the land, and centre at Oldtown,
their village near Bangor. These aborigines
are the birch-builders. They detect by the river-side
the tree barked with material for canoes. They
strip it, and fashion an artistic vessel, which civilization
cannot better. Launched in the fairy lightness
of this, and speeding over foamy waters
between forest-solitudes, one discovers, as if he
were the first to know it, the truest poetry of
pioneer-life.

Such poetry Iglesias had sung to me, until my
life seemed imcomplete while I did not know the
sentiment by touch: description, even from the
most impassioned witness, addressed to the most
imaginative hearer, is feeble. We both wanted
to be in a birch: Iglesias, because he knew the
fresh, inspiring vivacity of such a voyage; I,
because I divined it. We both needed to be somewhere
near the heart of New England's wildest
wilderness. We needed to see Katahdin, — the
distinctest mountain to be found on this side of the
continent. Katahdin was known to Iglesias. He
had scuffled up its eastern land-slides with a squad
of lumbermen. He had birched it down to Lake
Chesuncook in bygone summers, to see Katahdin
distant. Now, in a birch we would slide down the
Penobscot, along its line of lakes, camp at Katahdin,
climb it, and speed down the river to tide-water.

That was the great object of all our voyage, with
its educating preludes, — Katahdin and a breathless
dash down the Penobscot. And while we
flashed along the gleam of the river, Iglesias fancied
he might see the visible, and hear the musical,
and be stirred by the beautiful. These, truly, are
not far from the daily life of any seer, listener, and
perceiver; but there, perhaps, up in the strong wilderness,
we might be recreated to a more sensitive
vitality. The Antæan treatment is needful for terrestrials,
unless they would dwindle. The diviner
the power in any artist-soul, the more distinctly is

he commanded to get near the divine without him.
Fancies pale, that are not fed on facts. It is very
easy for any man to be a plagiarist from himself,
and present his own reminiscences half disguised,
instead of new discoveries. Now up by Katahdin
there were new discoveries to be made; and that
mountain would sternly eye us, to know whether
Iglesias were a copyist, or I a Cockney.

Katahdin was always in its place up in the
woods. The Penobscot was always buzzing along
toward the calm reaches, where it takes the shadow
of the mountain. All we needed was the birch.

The birch thrust itself under our noses as we
drove into Greenville. It was mounted upon a
coach that preceded us, and wabbled oddly along,
like a vast hat upon a dwarf. We talked with its
owner, as he dismounted it. He proved our very
man. He and his amphibious canoe had just made
the trip we proposed, with a flotilla. Certain Bostonians
had essayed it, — vague Northmen, preceding
our Columbus voyage.

Enter now upon the scene a new and important
character, Cancut the canoe-man. Mr. Cancut,
owner and steerer of a birch, who now became our
“guide, philosopher, and friend,” is as American
as a birch, as the Penobscot, or as Katahdin's self.
Cancut was a jolly fatling, — almost too fat, if he
will pardon me, for sitting in the stern of the imponderable
canoe. Cancut, though for this summer
boatman or bircher, had other strings to his bow.
He was taking variety now, after employment more

monotonous. Last summer, his services had been
in request throughout inhabited Maine, to “peddle
gravestones and collect bills.” The Gravestone-Peddler
is an institution of New England. His
wares are wanted, or will be wanted, by every one.
Without discriminating the bereaved households, he
presents himself at any door, with attractive drawings
of his wares, and seduces people into paying
the late tribute to their great-grandfather, or laying
up a monument for themselves against the inevitable
day of demand. His customers select from his
samples a tasteful “set of stones”; and next summer
he drives up and unloads the marble, with the
names well spelt, and the cherub's head artistically
chiselled by the best workmen of Boston. Cancut
told us, as an instance of judicious economy, how,
when he called once upon a recent widow to ask
what he could do in his line for her deceased husband's
tomb, she chose from his patterns neat head-and
foot-stones for the dear defunct, and then bargained
with him to throw in a small pair for her boy
Johnny, — a poor, sick crittur, that would be wanting
his monument long before next summer.

This lugubrious business had failed to infect Mr.
Cancut with corresponding deportment. Undertakers
are always sombre in dreary mockery of woe.
Sextons are solemncholy, if not solemn. I fear
Cancut was too cheerful for his trade, and therefore
had abandoned it.

Such was our guide, the captain, steersman, and
ballaster of our vessel. We struck our bargain

with him at once, and at once proceeded to make
preparations. Chiefly we prepared by stripping
ourselves bare of everything except “must-haves.”
A birch, besides three men, will carry only the simplest
baggage of a trio. Passengers who are constantly
to make portages will not encumber themselves
with what-nots. Man must have clothes for
day and night, and must have provisions to keep
his clothes properly filled out. These two articles
we took in compact form, regretting even the necessity
of guarding against a ducking by a change
of clothes. Our provision, that unrefined pork and
hard-tack, presently to be converted into artist
and friend, was packed with a few delicacies in a
firkin, — a commodious case, as we found.

A little steamer plies upon the lake, doing lumber-jobs,
and not disdaining the traveller's dollars.
Upon this, one August morning, we embarked ourselves
and our frail birch, for our voyage to the upper
end of Moosehead. Iglesias, in a red shirt, became
a bit of color in the scene. I, in a red shirt,
repeated the flame. Cancut, outweighing us both
together, in a broader red shirt, outglared us both.
When we three met, and our scarlet reflections
commingled, there was one spot in the world gorgeous
as a conclave of cardinals, as a squad of
British grenadiers, as a Vermont maple-wood in
autumn.

7. CHAPTER VII.
MOOSEHEAD.

Moosehead Lake is a little bigger than the Lago
di Guarda, and therefore, according to our American
standard, rather more important. It is not
very grand, not very picturesque, but considerably
better than no lake, — a meritorious mean; not
pretty and shadowy, like a thousand lakelets all
over the land, nor tame, broad, and sham-oceanic,
like the tanks of Niagara. On the west, near its
southern end, is a well-intended blackness and
roughness called Squaw Mountain. The rest on
that side is undistinguished pine woods.

Mount Kinneo is midway up the lake, on the east.
It is the show-piece of the region, — the best they
can do for a precipice, and really admirably done.
Kinneo is a solid mass of purple flint rising seven
hundred feet upright from the water. By the side
of this block could some Archimedes appear, armed
with a suitable “pou stô” and a mallet heavy
enough, he might strike fire to the world. Since
percussion-guns and friction cigar-lighters came in,
flint has somewhat lost its value; and Kinneo is
of no practical use at present. We cannot allow
inutilities in this world. Where is the Archimedes?
He could make a handsome thing of it by
flashing us off with a spark into a new system of
things.

Below this dangerous cliff on the lake-bank is
the Kinneo House, where fishermen and sportsmen
may dwell, and kill or catch, as skill or fortune
favors. The historical success of all catchers and
killers is well balanced, since men who cannot master
facts are always men of imagination, and it is
as easy for them to invent as for the other class to
do. Boston men haunt Kinneo. For a hero who
has not skill enough or imagination enough to kill
a moose stands rather in Nowhere with Boston
fashion. The tameness of that pleasant little capital
makes its belles ardent for tales of wild adventure.
New York women are less exacting; a few
of them, indeed, like a dash of the adventurous in
their lover; but most of them are business-women,
fighting their way out of vulgarity into style, and
romance is an interruption.

Kinneo was an old station of Iglesias's, in those
days when he was probing New England for the
picturesque. When the steamer landed, he acted
as cicerone, and pointed out to me the main object
of interest thereabouts, — the dinner-table. We
dined with lumbermen and moose-hunters, scufflingly.

The moose is the lion of these regions. Near
Greenville, a gigantic pair of moose-horns marks a
fork in the road. Thenceforth moose-facts and
moose-legends become the staple of conversation.
Moose-meat, combining the flavor of beefsteak and
the white of turtle, appears on the table. Moose-horns
with full explanations, so that the buyer can

play the part of hunter, are for sale. Tame moose-lings
are exhibited. Sportsmen at Kinneo can
choose a matinée with the trout or a soirée with the
moose.

The chief fact of a moose's person is that pair of
strange excrescences, his horns. Like fronds of
tree-fern, like great corals or sea-fans, these great
palmated plates of bone lift themselves from his
head, grand, useless, clumsy. A pair of moose-horns
overlooks me as I write; they weigh twenty
pounds, are nearly five feet in spread, on the right
horn are nine developed and two undeveloped
antlers, the plates are sixteen inches broad, — a
doughty head-piece.

Every year the great, slow-witted animal must
renew his head-gear. He must lose the deformity,
his pride, and cultivate another. In spring, when
the first anemone trembles to the vernal breeze, the
moose nods welcome to the wind, and as he nods
feels something rattle on his skull. He nods again,
as Homer sometimes did. Lo! something drops.
A horn has dropped, and he stands a bewildered
unicorn. For a few days he steers wild; in this
ill-balanced course his lone horn strikes every tree
on this side as he dodges from that side. The unhappy
creature is staggered, body and mind. In
what Jericho of the forest can he hide his diminished
head? He flies frantic. He runs amuck
through the woods. Days pass by in gloom, and
then comes despair; another horn falls, and he
becomes defenceless; and not till autumn does his
brow bear again its full honors.

I make no apology for giving a few lines to the
great event of a moose's life. He is the hero of
those evergreen-woods, — a hero too little recognized,
except by stealthy assassins, meeting him
by midnight for massacre. No one seems to have
viewed him in his dramatic character, as a forest-monarch
enacting every year the tragicomedy of
decoronation and recoronation.

The Kinneo House is head-quarters for moose-hunters.
This summer the waters of Maine were
diluvial, the feeding-grounds were swamped. Of
this we took little note: we were in chase of something
certain not to be drowned; and the higher
the deluge, the easier we could float to Katahdin.
After dinner we took the steamboat again for the
upper end of the lake.

It was a day of days for sunny summer sailing.
Purple haziness curtained the dark front of
Kinneo, — a delicate haze purpled by this black
promontory, but melting blue like a cloud-fall of
cloudless sky upon loftier distant summits. The
lake rippled pleasantly, flashing at every ripple.

Suddenly, “Katahdin!” said Iglesias.

Yes, there was a dim point, the object of our
pilgrimage.

Katahdin, — the more I saw of it, the more
grateful I was to the three powers who enabled me
to see it: to Nature for building it, to Iglesias
for guiding me to it, to myself for going.

We sat upon the deck and let Katahdin grow, —

and sitting, talked of mountains, somewhat to this
effect: —

Mountains are the best things to be seen.
Within the keen outline of a great peak is packed
more of distance, of detail, of light and shade, of
color, of all the qualities of space, than vision can
get in any other way. No one who has not seen
mountains knows how far the eye can reach. Level
horizons are within cannon-shot. Mountain horizons
not only may be a hundred miles away, but
they lift up a hundred miles at length, to be seen
at a look. Mountains make a background against
which blue sky can be seen; between them and
the eye are so many miles of visible atmosphere,
domesticated, brought down to the regions of earth,
not resting overhead, a vagueness and a void. Air,
blue in full daylight, rose and violet at sunset,
gray like powdered starlight by night, is collected
and isolated by a mountain, so that the eye can
comprehend it in nearer acquaintance. There is
nothing so refined as the outline of a distant mountain:
even a rose-leaf is stiff-edged and harsh in
comparison. Nothing else has that definite indefiniteness,
that melting permanence, that evanescing
changelessness. Clouds in vain strive to imitate
it; they are made of slighter stuff; they can be
blunt or ragged, but they cannot have that solid
positiveness.

Mountains, too, are very stationary, — always at
their post. They are characters of dignity, not
without noble changes of mood; but these changes

are not bewildering, capricious shifts. A mountain
can be studied like a picture; its majesty, its grace,
can be got by heart. Purple precipice, blue pyramid,
cone or dome of snow, it is a simple image
and a positive thought. It is a delicate fact, first,
of beauty, — then, as you approach, a strong fact
of majesty and power. But even in its cloudy, distant
fairness there is a concise, emphatic reality
altogether uncloudlike.

Manly men need the wilderness and the mountain.
Katahdin is the best mountain in the wildest
wild to be had on this side the continent. He
looked at us encouragingly over the hills. I saw
that he was all that Iglesias, connoisseur of mountains,
had promised, and was content to wait for
the day of meeting.

The steamboat dumped us and our canoe on a
wharf at the lake-head about four o'clock. A
wharf promised a settlement, which, however, did
not exist. There was population, — one man and
one great ox. Following the inland-pointing nose
of the ox, we saw, penetrating the forest, a wooden
railroad. Ox-locomotive, and no other, befitted
such rails. The train was one great go-cart. We
packed our traps upon it, roofed them with our
birch, and, without much ceremony of whistling,
moved on. As we started, so did the steamboat.
The link between us and the inhabited world grew
more and more attenuated. Finally it snapped, and
we were in the actual wilderness.

I am sorry to chronicle that Iglesias hereupon
turned to the ox, and said impatiently, —

“Now, then, bullgine!”

Why a railroad, even a wooden one, here? For
this: the Penobscot at this point approaches within
two and a half miles of Moosehead Lake, and over
this portage supplies are taken conveniently for
the lumbermen of an extensive lumbering country
above, along the river.

Corduroy railroad, ox-locomotive, and go-cart
train up in the pine woods were a novelty and a
privilege. Our cloven-hoofed engine did not whirr
turbulently along, like a thing of wheels. Slow
and sure must the knock-kneed chewer of cuds
step from log to log. Creakingly the wain followed
him, pausing and starting and pausing again with
groans of inertia. A very fat ox was this, protesting
every moment against his employment, where
speed, his duty, and sloth, his nature, kept him
bewildered by their rival injunctions. Whenever
the engine-driver stopped to pick a huckleberry,
the train, self-braking, stopped also, and the engine
took in fuel from the tall grass that grew between
the sleepers. It was the sensation of sloth at its
uttermost.

Iglesias and I, meanwhile, marched along and
shot the game of the country, namely, one Tetrao
Canadensis, one spruce-partridge, making in all one
bird, quite too pretty to shoot with its red and
black plumage. The spruce-partridge is rather
rare in inhabited Maine, and is malignantly accused

of being bitter in flesh, and of feeding on sprucebuds
to make itself distasteful. Our bird we found
sweetly berry-fed. The bitterness, if any, was that
we had not a brace.

So, at last, in an hour, after shooting one bird
and swallowing six million berries, for the railroad
was a shaft into a mine of them, we came to the
terminus. The chewer of cuds was disconnected,
and plodded off to his stable. The go-cart slid
down an inclined plane to the river, the Penobscot.

We paid quite freely for our brief monopoly of
the railroad to the superintendent, engineer, stoker,
poker, switch-tender, brakeman, baggage-master,
and every other official in one. But who would
grudge his tribute to the enterprise that opened
this narrow vista through toward the Hyperboreans,
and planted these once not crumbling sleepers
and once not rickety rails, to save the passenger a
portage? Here, at Bullgineville, the pluralist railroad-manager
had his cabin and clearing, ox-engine
house and warehouse.

To balance these symbols of advance, we found
a station of the rear-guard of another army. An
Indian party of two was encamped on the bank.
The fusty sagamore of this pair was lying wounded;
his fusty squaw tended him tenderly, minding,
meanwhile, a very witch-like caldron of savory
fume. No skirmish, with actual war-whoop and
sheen of real scalping-knife, had put this prostrate
chieftain here hors du combat. He had shot himself
cruelly by accident. So he informed us feebly,

in a muddy, guttural patois of Canadian French.
This aboriginal meeting was of great value; it
helped to eliminate the railroad.

8. CHAPTER VIII.
PENOBSCOT.

It was now five o'clock of an August evening.
Our work-day was properly done. But we were
to camp somewhere, “anywhere out of the world”
of railroads. The Penobscot glimmered winningly.
Our birch looked wistful for its own element. Why
not marry shallop to stream? Why not yield to
the enticement of this current, fleet and clear, and
gain a few beautiful miles before nightfall? All
the world was before us where to choose our bivouac.
We dismounted our birch from the truck,
and laid its lightness upon the stream. Then we
became stevedores, stowing cargo. Sheets of
birch-bark served for dunnage. Cancut, in flamboyant
shirt, ballasted the after-part of the craft.
For the present, I, in flamboyant shirt, paddled in
the bow, while Iglesias, similarly glowing, sat à la
Turque midships among the traps. Then, with a
longing sniff at the caldron of Soggysampcook, we
launched upon the Penobscot.

Upon no sweeter stream was voyager ever

launched than this of our summer-evening sail.
There was no worse haste in its more speed; it
went fleetly lingering along its leafy dell. Its current,
unripplingly smooth, but dimpled ever, and
wrinkled with the whirls that mark an underflow
deep and shady, bore on our bark. The banks
were low and gently wooded. No Northern forest,
rude and gloomy with pines, stood stiffly and
unsympathizingly watching the graceful water, but
cheerful groves and delicate coppices opened in
vistas where level sunlight streamed, and barred
the river with light, between belts of lightsome
shadow. We felt no breeze, but knew of one,
keeping pace with us, by a tremor in the birches
as it shook them. On we drifted, mile after mile,
languidly over sweet calms. One would seize his
paddle, and make our canoe quiver for a few spasmodic
moments. But it seemed needless and impertinent
to toil, when noiselessly and without any
show of energy the water was bearing us on, over
rich reflections of illumined cloud and blue sky,
and shadows of feathery birches, bearing us on so
quietly that our passage did not shatter any fair
image, but only drew it out upon the tremors of
the water.

So, placid and beautiful as an interview of first
love, went on our first meeting with this Northern
river. But water, the feminine element, is so mobile
and impressible that it must protect itself by
much that seems caprice and fickleness. We
might be sure that the Penobscot would not always

flow so gently, nor all the way from forests
to the sea conduct our bark without one shiver of
panic, where rapids broke noisy and foaming over
rocks that showed their grinding teeth at us.

Sunset now streamed after us down the river.
The arbor-vitæ along the banks marked tracery
more delicate than any ever wrought by deftest
craftsman in western window of an antique fane.
Brighter and richer than any tints that ever poured
through painted oriel flowed the glories of sunset.
Dear, pensive glooms of nightfall drooped from the
zenith slowly down, narrowing twilight to a belt
of dying flame. We were aware of the ever fresh
surprise of starlight: the young stars were born
again.

Sweet is the charm of starlit sailing where no
danger is. And in days when the Munki Mannakens
were foes of the pale-face, one might dash
down rapids by night in the hurry of escape. Now
the danger was before, not pursuing. We must
camp before we were hurried into the first “rips”
of the stream, and before night made bush-ranging
and camp-duties difficult.

But these beautiful thickets of birch and alder
along the bank, how to get through them? We
must spy out an entrance. Spots lovely and damp,
circles of ferny grass beneath elms offered themselves.
At last, as to patience always, appeared
the place of wisest choice. A little stream, the
Ragmuff, entered the Penobscot. “Why Ragmuff?”
thought we, insulted. Just below its

mouth two spruces were propylœa to a little glade,
our very spot. We landed. Some hunters had
once been there. A skeleton lodge and frame of
poles for drying moose-hides remained.

Like skilful campaigners, we at once distributed
ourselves over our work. Cancut wielded the axe;
I the match-box; Iglesias the batterie de cuisine.
Ragmuff drifted one troutling and sundry chubby
chub down to nip our hooks. We re-roofed our
camp with its old covering of hemlock-bark, spreading
over a light tent-cover we had provided. The
last glow of twilight dulled away; monitory mists
hid the stars.

Iglesias, as chef, with his two marmitons, had,
meanwhile, been preparing supper. It was dark
when he, the colorist, saw that fire with delicate
touches of its fine brushes had painted all our
viands to perfection. Then, with the same fire
stirred to illumination, and dashing masterly glows
upon landscape and figures, the trio partook of the
supper and named it sublime.

Here follows the carte of the Restaurant Ragmuff,
— woodland fare, a banquet simple, but elegant:
—

Poisson.

Truite. Meunier.

Entrées.

Porc frit au naturel.

Côtelettes d'Élan.

Rôti.

Tetrao Canadensis.

Dessert.

Hard-Tack. Fromage.

Vins.

Ragmuff blanc. Penobscot mousseux.

Thé. Chocolat de Bogotá.

Petit verre de Cognac.

At that time I had a temporary quarrel with the
frantic nineteenth century's best friend, tobacco,
— and Iglesias, being totally at peace with himself
and the world, never needs anodynes. Cancut,
therefore, was the only cloud-blower.

We two solaced ourselves with scorning civilization
from our vantage-ground. We were beyond
fences, away from the clash of town-clocks, the
clink of town-dollars, the hiss of town-scandals.
As soon as one is fairly in camp and has begun to
eat with his fingers, he is free. He and truth are
at the bottom of a well, — a hollow, fire-lighted
cylinder of forest. While the manly man of the
woods is breathing Nature like an Amreeta draught,
is it anything less than the summum bonum?

“Yet some call American life dull.”

“Ay, to dullards!” ejaculated Iglesias.

Moose were said to haunt these regions. Toward
midnight our would-be moose-hunter paddled
about up and down, seeking them and finding
not. The waters were too high. Lily-pads were
drowned. There were no moose looming duskily
in the shallows, to be done to death at their
banquet. They were up in the pathless woods,
browsing on leaves and deappetizing with bitter

bark. Starlight paddling over reflected stars
was enchanting, but somniferous. We gave up
our vain quest and glided softly home, — already
we called it home, — toward the faint embers of
our fire. Then all slept, as only woodmen sleep,
save when for moments Cancut's trumpet-tones
sounded alarums, and we others awoke to punch
and batter the snorer into silence.

In due time, bird and cricket whistled and chirped
the reveille. We sprang from our lair. We dipped
in the river and let its gentle friction polish us more
luxuriously than ever did any hair-gloved polisher
of an Oriental bath. Our joints crackled for themselves
as we beat the current. From bath like this
comes no unmanly kief, no sensuous, slumberous,
dreamy indifference, but a nervous, intent, keen,
joyous activity. A day of deeds is before us, and
we would be doing.

When we issue from the Penobscot, from our
baptism into a new life, we need no valet for elaborate
toilet. Attire is simple, when the woods are
the tiring-room.

When we had taken off the water and put on our
clothes, we simultaneously thought of breakfast.
Like a circle of wolves around the bones of a banquet,
the embers of our fire were watching each
other over the ashes; we had but to knock their
heads together and fiery fighting began. The
skirmish of the brands boiled our coffee and fried
our pork, and we embarked and shoved off. A thin
blue smoke, floating upward, for an hour or two,

marked our bivouac; soon this had gone out, and
the banks and braes of Ragmuff were lonely as if
never a biped had trodden them. Nature drops
back to solitude as easily as man to peace; — how
little this fair globe would miss mankind!

The Penobscot was all asteam with morning
mist. It was blinding the sun with a matinal oblation
of incense. A crew of the profane should not
interfere with such act of worship. Sacrilege is
perilous, whoever be the God. We were instantly
punished for irreverence. The first “rips” came
up-stream under cover of the mist, and took us by
surprise. As we were paddling along gently, we
suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a boiling
rapid. Gnashing rocks, with cruel foam upon their
lips, sprang out of the obscure, eager to tear us.
Great jaws of ugly blackness snapped about us, as
if we were introduced into a coterie of crocodiles.
Symplegades clanged together behind; mighty
gulfs, below seducing bends of smooth water,
awaited us before. We were in for it. We spun,
whizzed, dashed, leaped, “cavorted”; we did
whatever a birch running the gantlet of whirlpools
and breakers may do, except the fatal finality
of a somerset. That we escaped, and only escaped.
We had been only reckless, not audacious; and
therefore peril, not punishment, befell us. The
rocks smote our frail shallop; they did not crush
it. Foam and spray dashed in our faces; solid
fluid below the crest did not overwhelm us. There
we were, presently, in water tumultuous, but not

frantic. There we were, three men floating in a
birch, not floundering in a maelstrom, — on the water,
not under it, — sprinkled, not drowned, — and
in a wild wonder how we got into it and how we
got out of it.

Cancut's paddle guided us through. Unwieldy
he may have been in person, but he could wield his
weapon well. And so, by luck and skill, we were
not drowned in the magnificent uproar of the rapid.
Success, that strange stirabout of Providence, accident,
and courage, were ours. But when we
came to the next cascading bit, though the mist
had now lifted, we lightened the canoe by two
men's avoirdupois, that it might dance, and not
blunder heavily, might seek the safe shallows,
away from the dangerous bursts of mid-current,
and choose passages where Cancut, with the setting-pole,
could let it gently down. So Iglesias
and I plunged through the labyrinthine woods, the
stream along.

Not long after our little episode of buffeting, we
shot out again upon smooth water, and soon, for it
is never smooth but it is smoothest, upon a lake,
Chesuncook.

9. CHAPTER IX.
CHESUNCOOK.

Chesuncook is a “bulge” of the Penobscot: so
much for its topography. It is deep in the woods,
except that some miles from its opening there is a
lumbering-station, with house and barns. In the
wilderness, man makes for man by a necessity of
human instinct. We made for the log-houses. We
found there an ex-barkeeper of a certain well-known
New York cockney coffee-house, promoted into a
frontiersman, but mindful still of flesh-pots. Poor
fellow, he was still prouder that he had once tossed
the foaming cocktail than that he could now fell
the forest-monarch. Mixed drinks were dearer to
him than pure air. When we entered the long,
low log-cabin, he was boiling doughnuts, as was
to be expected. In certain regions of America
every cook who is not baking pork and beans is
boiling doughnuts, just as in certain other gastronomic
quarters frijoles alternate with tortillas.

Doughnuts, like peaches, must be eaten with the
dew upon them. Caught as they come bobbing
up in the bubbling pot, I will not say that they
are despicable. Woodsmen and canoemen, competent
to pork and beans, can master also the alternative.
The ex-barkeeper was generous with these
brown and glistening langrage-shot, and aimed
volley after volley at our mouths. Nor was he

content with giving us our personal fill; into every
crevice of our firkin he packed a pellet of future
indigestion. Besides this result of foraging, we
took the hint from a visible cow that milk might be
had. Of this also the ex-barkeeper served us out
galore, sighing that it was not the punch of his
metropolitan days. We put our milk in our teapot,
and thus, with all the ravages of the past
made good, we launched again upon Chesuncook.

Chesuncook, according to its quality of lake, had
no aid to give us with current. Paddling all a
hot August midday over slothful water would be
tame, day-laborer's work. But there was a breeze.
Good! Come, kind Zephyr, fill our red blanketsail!
Cancut's blanket in the bow became a substitute
for Cancut's paddle in the stern. We swept
along before the wind, unsteadily, over Lake Chesuncook,
at sea in a bowl, — “rolled to starboard,
rolled to larboard,” in our keelless craft. Zephyr
only followed us, mild as he was strong, and strong
as he was mild. Had he been puffy, it would have
been all over with us. But the breeze only sang
about our way, and shook the water out of sunny
calm. Katahdin to the north, a fair blue pyramid,
lifted higher and stooped forward more imminent,
yet still so many leagues away that his features
were undefined, and the gray of his scalp undistinguishable
from the green of his beard of forest.
Every mile, however, as we slid drowsily over the
hot lake, proved more and more that we were not
befooled, — Iglesias by memory, and I by anticipation.

Katahdin lost nothing by approach, as some
of the grandees do: as it grew bigger, it grew better.

Twenty miles, or so, of Chesuncook, of sun-cooked
Chesuncook, we traversed by the aid of our blanketsail,
pleasantly wafted by the unboisterous breeze.
Undrowned, unducked, as safe from the perils of
the broad lake as we had come out of the defiles
of the rapids, we landed at the carry below the
dam at the lake's outlet.

The skin of many a slaughtered varmint was
nailed on its shingle, and the landing-place was
carpeted with the fur. Doughnuts, ex-barkeepers,
and civilization at one end of the lake, and here
were muskrat-skins, trappers, and the primeval.
Two hunters of moose, in default of their fern-horned,
blubber-lipped game, had condescended
to muskrat, and were making the lower end of
Chesuncook fragrant with muskiness.

It is surprising how hospitable and comrade a
creature is man. The trappers of muskrats were
charmingly brotherly. They guided us across the
carry; they would not hear of our being porters.
“Pluck the superabundant huckleberry,” said
they, “while we, suspending your firkin and your
traps upon the setting-pole, tote them, as the spies
of Joshua toted the grape-clusters of the Promised
Land.”

Cancut, for his share, carried the canoe. He
wore it upon his head and shoulders. Tough work
he found it, toiling through the underwood, and

poking his way like an elongated and mobile mushroom
through the thick shrubbery. Ever and
anon, as Iglesias and I paused, we would be aware
of the canoe thrusting itself above our heads in the
covert, and a voice would come from an unseen
head under its shell, — “It 's soul-breaking, carrying
is!”

The portage was short. We emerged from the
birchen grove upon the river, below a brilliant cascading
rapid. The water came flashing gloriously
forward, a far other element than the tame, flat
stuff we had drifted slowly over all the dullish
hours. Water on the go is nobler than water on
the stand; recklessness may be as fatal as stagnation,
but it is more heroic.

Presently, over the edge, where the foam and
spray were springing up into sunshine, our canoe
suddenly appeared, and had hardly appeared, when,
as if by one leap, it had passed the rapid, and was
gliding in the stiller current at our feet. One of
the muskrateers had relieved Cancut of his head-piec,
and shot the lower rush of water. We
again embarked, and, guided by the trappers in
their own canoe, paddled out upon Lake Pepogenus.

10. CHAPTER X.
RIPOGENUS.

Ripogenus is a tarn, a lovely oval tarn, within a
rim of forest and hill; and there behold, O gioja!
at its eastern end, stooping forward and filling the
sphere, was Katahdin, large and alone.

But we must hasten, for day wanes, and we
must see and sketch this cloudless summit from
terra firma. A mile and half-way down the lake,
we landed at the foot of a grassy hill-side, where
once had been a lumberman's station and hay-farm.
It was abandoned now, and lonely in that deeper
sense in which widowhood is lonelier than celibacy,
a home deserted lonelier than a desert. Tumbledown
was the never-painted house; ditto its three
barns. But, besides a camp, there were two things
to be had here, — one certain, one possible, probable
even. The view, that was an inevitable certainty;
Iglesias would bag that as his share of the
plunder of Ripogenus. For my bagging, bears,
perchance, awaited. The trappers had seen a bear
near the barns. Cancut, in his previous visit, had
seen a disappearance of bear. No sooner had the
birch's bow touched lightly upon the shore than
we seized our respective weapons, — Iglesias his
peaceful and creative sketch-book, I my warlike
and destructive gun, — and dashed up the hill-side.

I made for the barns to catch Bruin napping or

lolling in the old hay. I entertain a vendetta toward
the ursine family. I had a duello, pistol
against claw, with one of them in the mountains
of Oregon, and have nothing to show to point the
moral and adorn the tale. My antagonist of that
hand-to-hand fight received two shots, and then
dodged into cover and was lost in the twilight.
Soon or late in my life, I hoped that I should
avenge this evasion. Ripogenus would, perhaps,
give what the Nachchese Pass had taken away.

Vain hope! I was not to be an ursicide. I
begin to fear that I shall slay no other than my
proper personal bearishness. I did my duty for
another result at Ripogenus. I bolted audaciously
into every barn. I made incursions into the woods
around. I found the mark of the beast, not the
beast. He had not long ago decamped, and was
now, perhaps, sucking the meditative paw hard-by
in an arbor of his bear-garden.

After a vain hunt, I gave up Beast and turned to
Beauty. I looked about me, seeing much.

Foremost I saw a fellow-man, my comrade,
fondled by breeze and brightness, and whispered
to by all sweet sounds. I saw Iglesias below me,
on the slope, sketching. He was preserving the
scene at its bel momento. I repented more bitterly
of my momentary falseness to Beauty while I saw
him so constant.

Furthermore, I saw a landscape of vigorous simplicity,
easy to comprehend. By mellow sunset
the grass slope of the old farm seemed no longer

tanned and rusty, but ripened. The oval lake was
blue and calm, and that is already much to say;
shadows of the western hills were growing over it,
but flight after flight of illumined cloud soared
above, to console the sky and the water for the
coming of night. Northward, a forest darkled,
whose glades of brightness I could not see. Eastward,
the bank mounted abruptly to a bare fire-swept
table-land, whereon a few dead trees stood,
parched and ghostly skeletons draped with rags
of moss.

Furthermost and topmost, I saw Katahdin twenty
miles away, a giant undwarfed by any rival. The
remainder landscape was only minor and judiciously
accessory. The hills were low before it, the lake
lowly, and upright above lake and hill lifted the
mountain pyramid. Isolate greatness tells. There
were no underling mounts about this mountain-in-chief.
And now on its shoulders and crest sunset
shone, glowing. Warm violet followed the glow,
soothing away the harshness of granite lines. Luminous
violet dwelt upon the peak, while below the
clinging forests were purple in sheltered gorges,
where they could climb nearer the summit, loved
of light, and lower down gloomed green and sombre
in the shadow.

Meanwhile, as I looked, the quivering violet rose
higher and higher, and at last floated away like
a disengaged flame. A smouldering blue dwelt
upon the peak. Ashy-gray overcame the blue. As
dusk thickened and stars trembled into sight, the

gray grew luminous. Katahdin's mighty presence
seemed to absorb such dreamy glimmers as float in
limpid night-airs: a faint glory, a twilight of its
own, clothed it. King of the daylit-world, it became
queen of the dimmer realms of night, and
like a woman-queen it did not disdain to stoop and
study its loveliness in the polished lake, and stooping
thus it overhung the earth, a shadowy creature
of gleam and gloom, an eternized cloud.

I sat staring and straying in sweet reverie, until
the scene before me was dim as metaphysics.
Suddenly a flame flashed up in the void. It grew
and steadied, and dark objects became visible
about it. In the loneliness — for Iglesias had disappeared
— I allowed myself a moment's luxury
of superstition. Were these the Cyclops of Katahdin?
Possibly. Were they Trolls forging diabolic
enginery, or Gypsies of Yankeedom? I will
see, — and went tumbling down the hill-side.

As I entered the circle about the cooking-fire of
drift-wood by the lake, Iglesias said, —

“The beef-steak and the mutton-chops will do
for breakfast; now, then, with your bear!”

“Haw, haw!” guffawed Cancut; and the sound,
taking the lake at a stride, found echoes everywhere,
till he grew silent and peered suspiciously
into the dark.

“There 's more bears raound 'n yer kin shake a
stick at,” said one of the muskrateers. “I would
n't ricommend yer to stir 'em up naow, haowlin'
like that.”

“I meant it for laffin',” said Cancut, humbly.

“Ef yer call that 'ere larfin', could n't yer cry a
little to kind er slick daown the bears?” said the
trapper.

Iglesias now invited us to chocolat à la crème,
made with the boon of the ex-barkeeper. I suppose
I may say, without flattery, that this tipple
was marvellous. What a pity Nature spoiled a
cook by making the muddler of that chocolate a
painter of grandeurs! When Fine Art is in a
man's nature, it must exude, as pitch leaks from
a pine-tree. Our muskrat-hunters partook injudiciously
of this unaccustomed dainty, and were
visited with indescribable Nemesis. They had
never been acclimated to chocolate, as had Iglesias
and I, by sipping it under the shade of the mimosa
and the palm.

Up to a certain point, an unlucky hunter is more
likely to hunt than a lucky. Satiety follows more
speedily upon success than despair upon failure.
Let us thank Heaven for that, brethren dear! I
had bagged not a bear, and must needs satisfy my
assassin instincts upon something with hoofs and
horns. The younger trapper of muskrat, being
young, was ardent, — being young, was hopeful,
— being young, believed in exceptions to general
rules, — and being young, believed that, given a
good fellow with a gun, Nature would provide
a victim. Therefore he proposed that we should
canoe it along the shallows in this sweetest and
stillest of all the nights. The senior shook his

head incredulously; Iglesias shook his head noddingly.

“Since you have massacred all the bears,” said
Iglesias, “I will go lay me down in their lair in
the barn. If you find me cheek-by-jowl with Ursa
Major when you come back, make a pun and he
will go.”

It was stiller than stillness upon the lake. Ripogenus,
it seemed, had never listened to such
silence as this. Calm never could have been so
beyond the notion of calm. Stars in the empyrean
and stars in Ripogenus winked at each other across
ninety-nine billions of leagues as uninterruptedly
as boys at a boarding-school table.

I knelt amidships in the birch with gun and
rifle on either side. The pilot gave one stroke of
his paddle, and we floated out upon what seemed
the lake. Whatever we were poised and floating
upon he hesitated to shatter with another dip of
his paddle, lest he should shatter the thin basis and
sink toward heaven and the stars.

Presently the silence seemed to demand gentle
violence, and the unwavering water needed slight
tremors to teach it the tenderness of its calm;
then my guide used his blade, and cut into glassiness.
We crept noiselessly along by the lake-edge,
within the shadows of the pines. With
never a plash we slid. Rare drops fell from the
cautious paddle and tinkled on the surface, overshot,
not parted by, our imponderable passage.
Sometimes from far within the forest would come

sounds of rustling branches or crackling twigs.
Somebody of life approaches with stealthy tread.
Gentlier, even gentlier, my steersman! Take up
no pearly drop from the lake, mother of pearliness,
lest falling it sound too loudly. Somewhat comes.
Let it come unterrified to our ambush among the
shadows by the shore.

Somewhat, something, somebody was coming,
perhaps, but some other thing or body thwarted it
and it came not. To glide over glassiness while
uneventful moments link themselves into hours is
monotonous. Night and stillness laid their soothing
spell upon me. I was entranced. I lost myself
out of time and space, and seemed to be floating
unimpelled and purposeless, nowhere in Forever.

Somewhere in Now I suddenly found myself.

There he was! There was the moose trampling
and snorting hard by, in the shallows of Ripogenus,
trampling out of being the whole nadir of stars,
making the world conscious of its lost silence by
the death of silence in tumult.

I trembled with sudden eagerness. I seized my
gun. In another instant I should have lodged the
fatal pellet! when a voice whispered over my
shoulder, — “I kinder guess yer 've ben asleep an'
dreamin', ha'n't yer?”

So I had.

Never a moose came down to cool his clumsy
snout in the water and swallow reflections of stars.
Never a moose abandoned dry-browse in the bitter
woods for succulent lily-pads, full in their cells and

veins of water and sunlight. Till long past midnight
we paddled and watched and listened, whisperless.
In vain. At last, as we rounded a point,
the level gleam of our dying camp-fire athwart
the water reminded us of passing hours and traveller
duties, of rest to-night and toil to-morrow.

My companions, fearless as if there were no
bears this side of Ursa Major, were bivouacked in
one of the barns. There I entered skulkingly, as
a gameless hunter may, and hid my untrophied
head beneath a mound of ancient hay, not without
the mustiness of its age.

No one clawed us, no one chawed us, that night.
A Ripogenus chill awaked the whole party with
early dawn. We sprang from our nests, shook the
hay-seed out of our hair, and were full-dressed
without more ceremony, ready for whatever grand
sensation Nature might purvey for our æsthetic
breakfast.

Nothing is ever as we expect. When we stepped
into out-of-doors, looking for Ripogenus, a lake of
Maine, we found not a single aquatic fact in the
landscape. Ripogenus, a lake, had mizzled, (as
the Americans say,) literally mizzled. Our simplified
view comprised a grassy hill with barns, and
a stern positive pyramid, surely Katahdin; aloft,
beyond, above, below, thither, hither, and yon,
Fog, — not fog, but FOG.

Ripogenus, the water-body, had had aspirations,
and a boon of brief transfiguration into a cloud-body
had been granted it by Nature, who grants

to every terrestrial essence prophetic experiences
of what it one day would be.

In short, and to repeat, Ripogenus had transmuted
itself into vapor, and filled the valley full
to our feet. A faint wind had power to billow
this mist-lake, and drive cresting surges up against
the eastern hill-side, over which they sometimes
broke, and, involving it totally, rolled clear and
free toward Katahdin, where he stood hiding the
glows of sunrise. Leagues higher up than the
mountain rested a presence of cirri, already white
and luminous with full daylight, and from them
drooped linking wreaths of orange mist, clinging
to the rosy-violet granite of the peak.

Up clomb and sailed Ripogenus and befogged
the whole; then we condescended to breakfast.

11. CHAPTER XI.
TOWARD KATAHDIN.

Singularly enough, mill-dams are always found
below mill-ponds. Analogously in the Maine rivers,
below the lakes, rapids are. Rapids too often
compel carries. While we breakfasted without
steak of bear or cutlet of moose, Ripogenus gradually
retracted itself, and became conscious again
of what poetry there is in a lake's pause and a

rapid's flow. Fog condensed into water, and water
submitting to its destiny went cascading down
through a wild defile where no birch could follow.

The Ripogenus carry is three miles long, a faint
path through thickets.

“First half,” said Cancut, “'s plain enough;
but after that 't would take a philosopher with his
spectacles on to find it.”

This was discouraging. Philosophers twain we
might deem ourselves; but what is a craftsman
without tools? And never a goggle had we.

But the trappers of muskrats had become our
fast friends. They insisted upon lightening our
loads over the brambly league. This was kindly.
Cancut's elongated head-piece, the birch, was his
share of the burden; and a bag of bread, a firkin of
various grub, damp blankets for three, and multitudinous
traps, seemed more than two could carry at
one trip over this longest and roughest of portages.

We paddled from the camp to the lake-foot, and
there, while the others compacted the portables
for portage, Iglesias and I, at cost of a ducking
with mist-drops from the thickets, scrambled up a
crag for a supreme view of the fair lake and the
clear mountain. And we did well. Katahdin, from
the hill guarding the exit of the Penobscot from
Ripogenus, is eminent and emphatic, a signal and
solitary pyramid, grander than any below the
realms of the unchangeable, more distinctly mountainous
than any mountain of those that stop short
of the venerable honors of eternal snow.

We trod the trail, we others, easier than Cancut.
He found it hard to thread the mazes of an overgrown
path and navigate his canoe at the same
time. “Better,” thought he, as he staggered and
plunged and bumped along, extricating his boatbonnet
now from a bower of raspberry-bushes,
now from the branches of a brotherly birch-tree, —
“better,” thought he, “were I seated in what I
bear, and bounding gayly over the billow. Peril
is better than pother.”

Bushwhacking thus for a league, we circumvented
the peril, and came upon the river flowing
fair and free. The trappers said adieu, and launched
us. Back then they went to consult their traps
and flay their fragrant captives, and we shot forward.

That was a day all poetry and all music. Mountain
airs bent and blunted the noonday sunbeams.
There was shade of delicate birches on either hand,
whenever we loved to linger. Our feather-shallop
went dancing on, fleet as the current, and whenever
a passion for speed came after moments of
luxurious sloth, we could change floating at the
river's will into leaps and chasing, with a few
strokes of the paddle. All was untouched, unvisited
wilderness, and we from bend to bend the
first discoverers. So we might fancy ourselves;
for civilization had been here only to cut pines, not
to plant houses. Yet these fair curves, and liberal
reaches, and bright rapids of the birchen-bowered
river were only solitary, not lonely. It is never

lonely with Nature. Without unnatural men or
unnatural beasts, she is capital society by herself.
And so we found her, — a lovely being in perfect
toilet, which I describe, in an indiscriminating,
masculine way, by saying that it was a forest and
a river and lakes and a mountain and doubtless
sky, all made resplendent by her judicious disposition
of a most becoming light. Iglesias and I,
being old friends, were received into close intimacy.
She smiled upon us unaffectedly, and had
a thousand exquisite things to say, drawing us out
also, with feminine tact, to say our best things,
and teaching us to be conscious, in her presence,
of more delicate possibilities of refinement and a
tenderer poetic sense. So we voyaged through
the sunny hours, and were happy.

Yet there was no monotony in our progress.
We could not always drift and glide. Sometimes
we must fight our way. Below the placid reaches
were the inevitable “rips” and rapids: some we
could shoot without hitting anything; some would
hit us heavily, did we try to shoot. Whenever
the rocks in the current were only as thick as the
plums in a boarding-school pudding, we could veture
to run the gantlet; whenever they multiplied
to a school-boy's ideal, we were arrested. Just at
the brink of peril we would sweep in by an eddy
into a shady pool by the shore. At such spots we
found a path across the carry. Cancut at once
proceeded to bonnet himself with the trickling
birch. Iglesias and I took up the packs and hurried

on with minds intent on berries. Berries we
always found, — blueberries covered with a cloudy
bloom, blueberries pulpy, saccharine, plenteous.

Often, when a portage was not quite necessary,
a dangerous bit of white water would require the
birch to be lightened. Cancut must steer her
alone over the foam, while we, springing ashore,
raced through the thick of the forest, tore through
the briers, and plunged through the punk of trees
older than history, now rotting where they fell,
slain by Time the Giganticide. Cancut then had
us at advantage. Sometimes we had laughed at
him, when he, a good-humored malaprop, made
vague clutches at the thread of discourse. Now
suppose he should take a fancy to drop down
stream and leave us. What then? Berries then,
and little else, unless we had a chance at a trout
or a partridge. It is not cheery, but dreary, to be
left in pathlessness, blanketless, guideless, and
with breadths of lake and mountain and Nature,
shaggy and bearish, between man and man. With
the consciousness of a latent shudder in our hearts
at such a possibility, we parted brier and bramble
until the rapid was passed, we scuffled hastily
through to the river-bank, and there always, in
some quiet nook, was a beacon of red-flannel shirt
among the green leaves over the blue and shadowy
water, and always the fast-sailing Cancut awaiting
us, making the woods resound to amicable hails,
and ready again to be joked and to retaliate.

Such alternations made our voyage a charming

olla. We had the placid glide, the fleet dash, the
wild career, the pause, the landing, the agreeable
interlude of a portage, and the unburdened stampede
along-shore. Thus we won our way, or our
way wooed us on, until, in early afternoon, a lovely
lakelet opened before us. The fringed shores retired,
and, as we shot forth upon wider calm, lo,
Katahdin! unlooked for, at last, as a revolution.
Our boat ruffled its shadow, doing pretty violence
to its dignity, that we might know the greater
grandeur of the substance. There was a gentle
agency of atmosphere softening the bold forms of
this startling neighbor, and giving it distance,
lest we might fear it would topple and crush us.
Clouds, level below, hid the summit and towered
aloft. Among them we might imagine the mountain
rising with thousands more of feet of heaven-piercing
height: there is one degree of sublimity
in mystery, as there is another degree in certitude.

We lay to in a shady nook, just off Katahdin's
reflection in the river, while Iglesias sketched him.
Meanwhile I, analyzing my view, presently discovered
a droll image in the track of a land-avalanche
down the front. It was a comical fellow, a little
giant, a colossal dwarf, six hundred feet high, and
should have been thrice as tall, had it had any
proper development, — for out of his head grew
two misdirected skeleton legs, “hanging down and
dangling.” The countenance was long, elfin, sneering,
solemn, as of a truculent demon, saddish for
his trade, an ashamed, but unrepentant rascal. He

had two immense erect ears, and in his boisterous
position had suffered a loss of hair, wearing nothing
save an impudent scalp-lock. A very grotesque
personage. Was he the guardian imp, the legendary
Eft of Katahdin, scoffing already at us as
verdant, and warning that he would make us unhappy,
if we essayed to appear in demon realms
and on Brocken heights without initiation?

“A terrible pooty mountain,” Cancut observed;
and so it is.

Not to fail in topographical duty, I record, that
near this lakelet flows in the river Sowadehunk, and
not far below, a sister streamlet, hardly less melodiously
named Ayboljockameegus. Opposite the
latter we landed and encamped, with Katahdin full
in front, and broadly visible.

12. CHAPTER XII.
CAMP KATAHDIN.

Our camping-place was worthy of its view. On
the bank, high and dry, a noble yellow birch had
been strong enough to thrust back the forest,
making a glade for its own private abode. Other
travellers had already been received in this natural
pavilion. We had had predecessors, and they had
built them a hut, a half roof of hemlock bark, resting

on a frame. Time had developed the wrinkles
in this covering into cracks, and cracks only wait
to be leaks. First, then, we must mend our mansion.
Material was at hand; hemlocks, with a
back-load of bark, stood ready to be disburdened.
In August they have worn their garment so long
that they yield it unwillingly. Cancut's axe, however,
was insinuating, not to say peremptory. He
peeled off and brought great scales of rough purple
roofing, and we disposed them, according to the
laws of forest architecture, upon our cabin. It
became a good example of the renaissance. Storm,
if such a traveller were approaching, was shut out
at top and sides; our blankets could become curtains
in front and completely hide us from that unwelcome
vagrant, should he peer about seeking
whom he might duck and what he might damage.

Our lodge, built, must be furnished. We need a
luxurious carpet, couch, and bed; and if we have
these, will be content without secondary articles.
Here, too, material was ready, and only the artist
wanting, to use it. While Cancut peeled the hemlocks,
Iglesias and I stripped off armfuls of boughs
and twigs from the spruces to “bough down” our
camp. “Boughing down” is shingling the floor
elaborately with evergreen foliage; and when it is
done well, the result counts among the high luxuries
of the globe. As the feathers of this bed are
harsh stems covered with leafage, the process of
bed-making must be systematic, the stems thoroughly
covered, and the surface smooth and elastic.

I have slept on the various beds of the world, — in
a hammock, in a pew, on German feathers, on a
bear-skin, on a mat, on a hide; all, all give but a
feeble, restless, unrecreating slumber, compared to
the spruce or hemlock bed in a forest of Maine.
This is fragrant, springy, soft, well-fitting, better
than any Sybarite's couch of uncrumpled rose-leaves.
It sweetly rustles when you roll, and, by a
gentle titillation with the little javelin-leaves, keeps
up a pleasant electricity over the cuticle. Rheumatism
never, after nights on such a bed; agues
never; vigor, ardor, fervor, always.

We despatched our camp-building and bed-making
with speed, for we had a purpose. The Penobscot
was a very beautiful river, and the Ayboljockameegus
a very pretty stream; and if there is one place
in the world where trout, at certain seasons, are
likely to be found, it is in a beautiful river at the
mouth of a pretty stream. Now we wanted trout;
it was in the programme that something more delicate
than salt-pork should grace our banquets before
Katahdin. Cancut sustained our a priori, that
trout were waiting for us over by the Aybol. By
this time the tree-shadows, so stiff at noon, began
to relax and drift down stream, cooling the surface.
The trout could leave their shy lairs down in the
chilly deeps, and come up without fear of being
parboiled. Besides, as evening came, trout thought
of their supper, as we did of ours.

Hereupon I had a new sensation. We made
ready our flies and our rods, and embarked, as I

supposed, to be ferried across and fish from terra
firma. But no. Cancut dropped anchor very
quietly opposite the Aybol's mouth. Iglesias, the
man of Maine experience, seemed naught surprised.
We were to throw our lines, as it appeared, from
the birch; we were to peril our lives on the unsteady
basis of a roly-poly vessel, — to keep our
places and ballast our bowl, during the excitement
of hooking pounds. Self-poise is an acrobatic feat,
when a person, not loaded at the heels, undertakes
trout-fishing from a birch.

We threw our flies. Instantly at the lucky
hackle something darted, seized it, and whirled to
fly, with the unwholesome bit in its mouth, up the
peaceful Ayboljockameegus. But the lucky man,
and he happened to be the novice, forgot, while
giving the capturing jerk of his hook, that his
fulcrum was not solid rock. The slight shell tilted,
turned — over not quite, over enough to give
everybody a start. One lesson teaches the docile.
Caution thereafter presided over our fishing. She
told us to sit low, keep cool, cast gently, strike
firmly, play lightly, and pull in steadily. So we
did. As the spotted sparklers were rapidly translated
from water to a lighter element, a well-fed
cheerfulness developed in our trio. We could not
speak, for fear of breaking the spell; we smiled
at each other. Twenty-three times the smile went
round. Twenty-three trout, and not a pigmy
among them, lay at our feet. More fish for one
dinner and breakfast would be waste and wanton

self-indulgence. We stopped. And I must avow,
not to claim too much heroism, that the fish had
also stopped. So we paddled home contented.

Then, O Walton! O Davy! O Scrope! ye
fishers hard by taverns! luxury was ours of which
ye know no more than a Chinaman does of music.
Under the noble yellow birch we cooked our own
fish. We used our scanty kitchen-battery with
skill. We cooked with the high art of simplicity.
Where Nature has done her best, only fools rush
in to improve: on the salmonids, fresh and salt,
she has lavished her creative refinements; cookery
should only ripen and develop. From our silver
gleaming pile of pounders, we chose the larger and
the smaller for appropriate experiments. Then we
tested our experiments; we tasted our examples.
Success. And success in science proves knowledge
and skill. We feasted. The delicacy of our
food made each feaster a finer essence.

So we supped, reclined upon our couch of spruce-twigs.
In our good cheer we pitied the Eft of Katahdin:
he might sneer, but he was supperless.
We were grateful to Nature for the grand mountain,
for the fair and sylvan woods, for the lovely
river and what it had yielded us.

By the time we had finished our flaky fare and
sipped our chocolate from the Magdalena, Night
announced herself, — Night, a jealous, dark lady,
eclipsed and made invisible all her rivals, that she
might solely possess us. Night's whispers lulled
us. The rippling river, the rustling leaves, the

hum of insects, grew more audible; and these are
gentle sounds that prove wide quietude in Nature,
and tell man that the burr and buzz in his day-laboring
brain have ceased, and he had better be
breathing deep in harmony. So we disposed ourselves
upon the fragrant couch of spruce-boughs,
and sank slowly and deeper into sleep, as divers
sink into the thick waters down below, into the
dreamy waters far below the plunge of sunshine.

By and by, as the time came for rising to the
surface again, and the mind began to be half conscious
of facts without it, as the diver may half
perceive light through thinning strata of sea, there
penetrated through my last layers of slumber a
pungent odor of wetted embers. It was raining
quietly. Drip was the pervading sound, as if the
rain-drops were counting aloud the leaves of the
forest. Evidently a resolute and permanent wetting
impended. On rainy days one does not climb
Katahdin. Instead of rising by starlight, breakfasting
by gray, and starting by rosy dawn, it
would be policy to persuade night to linger long
into the hours of a dull day. When daylight
finally came, dim and sulky, there was no rivalry
among us which should light the fire. We did
not leap, but trickled slowly forth into the inhospitable
morning, all forlorn. Wet days in camp
try “grit.” “Clear grit” brightens more crystalline,
the more it is rained upon; sham grit dissolves
into mud and water.

Yankees, who take in pulverized granite with

every breath of their native dust, are not likely to
melt in a drizzle. We three certainly did not.
We reacted stoutly against the forlorn weather,
unpacking our internal stores of sunshine, as a
camel in a desert draws water from his inner tank
when outer water fails. We made the best of it.
A breakfast of trout and trimmings looks nearly
as well and tastes nearly as well in a fog as in a
glare: that we proved by experience at Camp
Katahdin.

We could not climb the mountain dark and dim;
we would not be idle: what was to be done?
Much. Much for sport and for use. We shouldered
the axe and sallied into the dripping forest.
Only a faint smoke from the smouldering logs
curled up among the branches of the yellow birch
over camp. We wanted a big smoke, and chopped
at the woods for fuel. Speaking for myself, I
should say that our wood-work was ill done. Iglesias
smiled at my axe-handling, and Cancut at his,
as chopping we sent chips far and wide.

The busy, keen, short strokes of the axe resounded
through the forest. When these had
done their work, and the bungler paused amid his
wasteful débris to watch his toil's result, first was
heard a rustle of leaves, as if a passing whirlwind
had alighted there; next came the crack of bursting
sinews; then the groan of a great riving spasm,
and the tree, decapitated at its foot, crashed to
earth, with a vain attempt to clutch for support at
the stiff, unpitying arms of its woodland brotherhood.

Down was the tree, — fallen, but so it should not
lie. This tree we proposed to promote from brute
matter, mere lumber, downcast and dejected, into
finer essence: fuel was to be made into fire.

First, however, the fuel must be put into portable
shape. We top-sawyers went at our prostrate
and vanquished non-resistant, and without
mercy mangled and dismembered him, until he
was merely a bare trunk, a torso incapable of
restoration.

While we were thus busy, useful, and happy,
the dripping rain, like a clepsydra, told off the
morning moments. The dinner-hour drew nigh.
We had determined on a feast, and trout were to
be its daintiest dainty. But before we cooked our
trout, we must, according to sage Kitchener's advice,
catch our trout. They were, we felt confident,
awaiting us in the refrigerate larder at
hand. We waited until the confusing pepper of
a shower had passed away and left the water
calm. Then softly and deftly we propelled our
bark across to the Ayboljockameegus. We tossed
to the fish humbugs of wool, silk, and feathers,
gauds such as captivate the greedy or the guileless.
Again the “gobemouches” trout, the fellows
on the look-out for novelty, dashed up and
swallowed disappointing juiceless morsels, and
with them swallowed hooks.

We caught an apostolic boat-load of beauties
fresh and blooming as Aurora, silver as the morning
star, gemmy with eye-spots as a tiger-lily.

O feast most festal! Iglesias, of course, was
the great artist who devised and mainly executed
it. As well as he could, he covered his pot and
pan from the rain, admitting only enough to season
each dish with gravy direct from the skies. As
day had ripened, the banquet grew ripe. Then as
day declined, we reclined on our triclinium of hemlock
and spruce boughs, and made high festival,
toasting each other in the uninebriating flow of our
beverages. Jollity reigned. Cancut fattened, and
visibly broadened. Toward the veriest end of the
banquet, we seemed to feel that there had been a
slight sameness in its courses. The Bill of Fare,
however, proved the freest variety. And at the
close we sat and sipped our chocolate with uttermost
content. No garçon, cringing, but firm,
would here intrude with the unhandsome bill.
Nothing to pay is the rarest of pleasures. This
dinner we had caught ourselves, we had cooked
ourselves, and had eaten for the benefit of ourselves
and no other. There was nothing to repent
of afterwards in the way of extravagance,
and certainly nothing of indigestion. Indigestion
in the forest primeval, in the shadow of Katahdin,
is impossible.

While we dined, we talked of our to-morrow's
climb of Katahdin. We were hopeful. We disbelieved
in obstacles. To-morrow would be fine.
We would spring early from our elastic bed and
stride topwards. Iglesias nerved himself and me
with a history of his ascent some years before, up

the eastern side of the mountain. He had left the
house of Mr. Hunt, the outsider at that time of
Eastern Maine, with a squad of lumbermen, and
with them tramped up the furrow of a land-avalanche
to the top, spending wet and ineffective
days in the dripping woods, and vowing then to
return and study the mountain from our present
camping-spot. I recalled also the first recorded
ascent of the Natardin or Catardin Mountain by
Mr. Turner in 1804, printed in the Massachusetts
Historical Society's Collections, and identified the
stream up whose valley he climbed with the Ayboljockameegus.
Cancut offered valuable contributions
to our knowledge from his recent ascent
with our Boston predecessors. To-morrow we
would verify our recollections and our fancies.

And so good night, and to our spruce bed.

13. CHAPTER XIII.
UP KATAHDIN.

Next morning, when we awoke, just before the
gray of dawn, the sky was clear and scintillating;
but there was a white cotton night-cap on the head
of Katahdin. As we inspected him, he drew his
night-cap down farther, hinting that he did not
wish to see the sun that day. When a mountain

is thus in the sulks after a storm, it is as well not
to disturb him: he will not offer the prize of a
view. Experience taught us this: but then experience
is only an empiric at the best.

Besides, whether Katahdin were bare-headed or
cloud-capped, it would be better to blunder upward
than lounge all day in camp and eat Sybaritic dinners.
We longed for the nervy climb. We must
have it. “Up!” said tingling blood to brain.
“Dash through the forest! Grasp the crag, and
leap the cleft! Sweet flash forth the streamlets
from granite fissures. To breathe the winds that
smite the peaks is life.”

As soon as dawn bloomed in the woods we
breakfasted, and ferried the river before sunrise.
The ascent subdivides itself into five zones. 1. A
scantily wooded acclivity, where bears abound.
2. A dense, swampy forest region. 3. Steep, mossy
mountain-side, heavily wooded. 4. A belt of dwarf
spruces, nearly impenetrable. 5. Ragged rock.

Cancut was our leader to-day. There are by far
too many blueberries in the first zone. No one,
of course, intends to dally, but the purple beauties
tempted, and too often we were seduced. Still
such yielding spurred us on to hastier speed, when
we looked up after delay and saw the self-denying
far ahead.

To write an epic or climb a mountain is merely
a dogged thing; the result is more interesting to
most than the process. Mountains, being cloud-compellers,
are rain-shedders, and the shed water

will not always flow with decorous gayety in dell
or glen. Sometimes it stays bewildered in a bog,
and here the climber must plunge. In the moist
places great trees grow, die, fall, rot, and barricade
the way with their corpses. Katahdin has to
endure all the ills of mountain being, and we had
all the usual difficulties to fight through doggedly.
When we were clumsy, we tumbled and rose up
torn. Still we plodded on, following a path blazed
by the Bostonians, Cancut's late charge, and we
grumblingly thanked them.

Going up, we got higher and drier. The mountain-side
became steeper than it could stay, and
several land-avalanches, ancient or modern, crossed
our path. It would be sad to think that all the
eternal hills were crumbling thus, outwardly, unless
we knew that they bubble up inwardly as fast.
Posterity is thus cared for in regard to the picturesque.
Cascading streams also shot by us, carrying
light and music. From them we stole refreshment,
and did not find the waters mineral and astringent,
as Mr. Turner, the first climber, calumniously
asserts.

The trees were still large and surprisingly parallel
to the mountain wall. Deep soft moss covered
whatever was beneath, and sometimes this would
yield and let the foot measure a crevice. Perilous
pitfalls; but we clambered unharmed. The moss,
so rich, deep, soft, and earthily fragrant, was a
springy stair-carpet of a steep stairway. And
sometimes when the carpet slipped and the state of

heels over head seemed imminent, we held to the
baluster-trees, as one after wassail clings to the
lamp-post.

Even on this minor mountain the law of diminishing
vegetation can be studied. The great trees
abandoned us, and stayed indolently down in shelter.
Next the little wiry trees ceased to be the
comrades of our climb. They were no longer to
be seen planted upon jutting crags, and, bold as
standard-bearers, inciting us to mount higher. Big
spruces, knobby with balls of gum, dwindled away
into little ugly dwarf spruces, hostile, as dwarfs
are said to be always, to human comfort. They
grew man-high, and hedged themselves together
into a dense thicket. We could not go under, nor
over, nor through. To traverse them at all, we
must recall the period when we were squirrels or
cats, in some former state of being.

Somehow we pierced, as man does ever, whether
he owes it to the beast or the man in him. From
time to time, when in this struggle we came to an
open point of rock, we would remember that we
were on high, and turn to assure ourselves that
nether earth was where we had left it. We always
found it in situ, in belts green, white, and blue, a
tricolor of woods, water, and sky. Lakes were
there without number, forest without limit. We
could not analyze yet, for there was work to do.
Also, whenever we paused, there was the old temptation,
blueberries. Every outcropping ledge offered
store of tonic, ozone-fed blueberries, or of

mountain-cranberries, crimson and of concentrated
flavor, or of the white snowberry, most delicate of
fruits that grow.

As we were creeping over the top of the dwarf
wood, Cancut, who was in advance, suddenly disappeared;
he seemed to fall through a gap in the
spruces, and we heard his voice calling in cavernous
tones. We crawled forward and looked over.
It was the upper camp of the Bostonians. They
had profited by a hole in the rocks, and chopped
away the stunted scrubs to enlarge it into a snug
artificial abyss. It was snug, and so to the eye is
a cell at Sing-Sing. If they were very misshapen
Bostonians, they may have succeeded in lying there
comfortably. I looked down ten feet into the
rough chasm, and I saw, Corpo di Bacco! I saw a
cork.

To this station our predecessors had come in an
easy day's walk from the river; here they had
tossed through a night, and given a whole day to
finish the ascent, returning hither again for a second
night. As we purposed to put all this travel within
one day, we could not stay and sympathize with
the late tenants. A little more squirrel-like skipping
and cat-like creeping over the spruces, and we
were out among bulky boulders and rough débris
on a shoulder of the mountain. Alas! the higher,
the more hopeless. Katahdin, as he had taken
pains to inform us, meant to wear the veil all day.
He was drawing down the white drapery about his
throat and letting it fall over his shoulders. Sun

and wind struggled mightily with his sulky fit;
sunshine rifted off bits of the veil, and wind seized,
whirled them away, and, dragging them over the
spruces below, tore them to rags. Evidently, if
we wished to see the world, we must stop here and
survey, before the growing vapor covered all. We
climbed to the edge of Cloudland, and stood fronting
the semicircle of southward view.

Katahdin's self is finer than what Katahdin sees.
Katahdin is distinct, and its view is indistinct. It
is a vague panorama, a mappy, unmethodic maze
of water and woods, very roomy, very vast, very
simple, — and these are capital qualities, but also
quite monotonous. A lover of largeness and scope
has the proper emotions stirred, but a lover of variety
very soon finds himself counting the lakes. It
is a wide view, and it is a proud thing for a man
six feet or less high, to feel that he himself, standing
on something he himself has climbed, and having
Katahdin under his feet a mere convenience,
can see all Maine. It does not make Maine less,
but the spectator more, and that is a useful moral
result. Maine's face, thus exposed, has almost no
features; there are no great mountains visible,
none that seem more than green hillocks in the distance.
Besides sky, Katahdin's view contains only
the two primal necessities of wood and water.
Nowhere have I seen such breadth of solemn forest,
gloomy, were it not for the cheerful interruption
of many fair lakes, and bright ways of river linking
them.

Far away on the southern horizon we detected
the heights of Mount Desert, our old familiar
haunt. All the northern semicircle was lost to us
by the fog. We lost also the view of the mountain
itself. All the bleak, lonely, barren, ancient
waste of the bare summit was shrouded in cold
fog. The impressive gray ruin and Titanic havoc
of a granite mountain-top, the heaped boulders,
the crumbling crags, the crater-like depression,
the long stern reaches of sierra, the dark curving
slopes channelled and polished by the storms and
fine drifting mists of æons, the downright plunge
of precipices, all the savageness of harsh rock, unsoftened
by other vegetation than rusty moss and
the dull green splashes of lichen, all this was hidden,
except when the mist, white and delicate
where we stood, but thick and black above, opened
whimsically and delusively, as mountain mists will
do, and gave us vistas into the upper desolation.
After such momentary rifts the mist thickened
again, and swooped forward as if to involve our
station; but noon sunshine, reverberated from the
plains and valleys and lakes below, was our ally;
sunshine checked the overcoming mist, and it
stayed overhead, an unwelcome parasol, making
our August a chilly November. Besides what our
eyes lost, our minds lost, unless they had imagination
enough to create it, the sentiment of triumph
and valiant energy that the man of body and soul
feels upon the windy heights, the highest, whence
he looks far and wide, like a master of realms,

and knows that the world is his; and they lost
the sentiment of solemn joy that the man of soul
recognizes as one of the surest intimations of
immortality, stirring within him, whenever he is
in the unearthly regions, the higher world.

We stayed studying the pleasant solitude and
dreamy breadth of Katahdin's panorama for a long
time, and every moment the mystery of the mist
above grew more enticing. Pride also was awakened.
We turned from sunshine and Cosmos into
fog and Chaos. We made ourselves quite miserable
for naught. We clambered up into Nowhere,
into a great, white, ghostly void. We saw nothing
but the rough surfaces we trod. We pressed along
crater-like edges, and all below was filled with mist,
troubled and rushing upward like the smoke of a
volcano. Up we went, — nothing but granite and
gray dimness. Where we arrived we know not.
It was a top, certainly: that was proved by the
fact that there was nothing within sight. We
cannot claim that it was the topmost top; Kimchinjinga
might have towered within pistol-shot;
popgun-shot was our extremest range of vision,
except for one instant, when a kind-hearted sunbeam
gave us a vanishing glimpse of a white lake
and breadth of forest far in the unknown North
toward Canada.

When we had thus reached the height of our
folly and made nothing by it, we addressed ourselves
to the descent, no wiser for our pains.
Descent is always harder than ascent, for divine

ambitions are stronger and more prevalent than
degrading passions. And when Katahdin is befogged,
descent is much more perilous than ascent.
We edged along very cautiously by remembered
landmarks the way we had come, and so, after a
dreary march of a mile or so through desolation,
issued into welcome sunshine and warmth at our
point of departure. When I said “we,” I did not
include the gravestone pedler. He, like a sensible
fellow, had determined to stay and eat berries
rather than breathe fog. While we wasted our
time, he had made the most of his. He had cleared
Katahdin's shoulders of fruit, and now, cuddled in
a sunny cleft, slept the sleep of the well-fed. His
red shirt was a cheerful beacon on our weary way.
We took in the landscape with one slow, comprehensive
look, and, waking Cancut suddenly, (who
sprang to his feet amazed, and cried “Fire!”) we
dashed down the mountain-side.

It was long after noon; we were some dozen of
miles from camp; we must speed. No glissade
was possible, nor plunge such as travellers make
down through the ash-heaps of Vesuvius; but,
having once worried through the wretched little
spruces, mean counterfeits of trees, we could fling
ourselves down from mossy step to step, measuring
off the distance by successive leaps of a second
each, and alighting, sound after each, on moss yielding
as a cushion.

On we hastened, retracing our footsteps of the
morning across the avalanches of crumbled granite,

through the bogs, along the brooks; undelayed by
the beauty of sunny glade or shady dell, never
stopping to botanize or to classify, we traversed
zone after zone, and safely ran the gantlet of the
possible bears on the last level. We found lowland
Nature still the same; Ayboljockameegus was flowing
still; so was Penobscot; no pirate had made
way with the birch; we embarked and paddled to
camp.

The first thing, when we touched terra firma,
was to look back regretfully toward the mountain.
Regret changed to wrath, when we perceived its
summit all clear and mistless, smiling warmly to
the low summer's sun. The rascal evidently had
only waited until we were out of sight in the woods
to throw away his night-cap.

One long rainy day had somewhat disgusted us
with the old hemlock-covered camp in the glade of
the yellow birch, and we were reasonably and not
unreasonably morbid after our disappointment with
Katahdin. We resolved to decamp. In the last
hour of sunlight, floating pleasantly from lovely
reach to reach, and view to view, we could choose
a spot of bivouac where no home-scenery would recall
any sorry fact of the past. We loved this
gentle gliding by the tender light of evening over
the shadowy river, marking the rhythm of our musical
progress by touches of the paddle. We determined,
too, that the balance of bodily forces
should be preserved: legs had been well stretched
over the bogs and boulders; now for the arms.

Never did our sylvan sojourn look so fair as when
we quitted it, and seemed to see among the streaming
sunbeams in the shadows the Hamadryads of
the spot returned, and waving us adieux. We forgot
how damp and leaks and puddles had forced
themselves upon our intimacy there; we remembered
that we were gay, though wet, and there had
known the perfection of Ayboljockameegus trout.

As we drifted along the winding river, between
the shimmering birches on either bank, Katahdin
watched us well. Sometimes he would show the
point of his violet gray peak over the woods, and
sometimes, at a broad bend of the water, he revealed
himself fully, and threw his great image
down beside for our nearer view. We began to
forgive him, to disbelieve in any personal spite of
his, and to recall that he himself, seen thus, was
far more precious than any mappy dulness we could
have seen from his summit. One great upright
pyramid like this was worth a continent of grovelling
acres.

Sunset came, and with it we landed at a point
below a lake-like stretch of the river, where the
charms of a neighbor and a distant view of the
mountain combined. Cancut the Unwearied roofed
with boughs an old frame for drying moose-hides,
while Iglesias sketched, and I worshipped Katahdin.
Has my reader heard enough of it, — a hillock
only six thousand feet high? We are soon to
drift away, and owe it here as kindly a farewell as
it gave us in that radiant twilight by the river.

From our point of view we raked the long stern
front tending westward. Just before sunset, from
beneath a belt of clouds evanescing over the summit,
an inconceivably tender, brilliant glow of rosy
violet mantled downward, filling all the valley.
Then the violet purpled richer and richer, and
darkened slowly to solemn blue, that blended with
the gloom of the pines and shadowy channelled
gorges down the steep. The peak was still in
sunlight, and suddenly, half-way down, a band
of roseate clouds, twining and changing like a
choir of Bacchantes, soared around the western
edge and hung poised above the unillumined forests
at the mountain-base; light as air they came
and went and faded away, ghostly, after their
work of momentary beauty was done. One slight
maple, prematurely ripened to crimson and heralding
the pomp of autumn, repeated the bright cloud-color
amid the vivid verdure of a little island, and
its image wavering in the water sent the flame
floating nearly to our feet.

Such are the transcendent moments of Nature,
unseen and disbelieved by the untaught. The poetic
soul lays hold of every such tender pageant
of beauty and keeps it forever. Iglesias, having
an additional method of preservation, did not fail
to pencil rapidly the wondrous scene. When he
had finished his dashing sketch of this glory, so
transitory, he peppered the whole with cabalistic
cipher, which only he could interpret into beauty.

Cancut's camp-fire now began to overpower the

faint glimmers of twilight. The single-minded
Cancut, little distracted by emotions, had heaped
together logs enough to heat any mansion for a
winter. The warmth was welcome, and the great
flame, with its bright looks of familiar comradery,
and its talk like the complex murmur of a throng,
made a fourth in our party by no means terrible, as
some other incorporeal visitors might have been.
Fire was not only a talker, but an important actor:
Fire cooked for us our evening chocolate; Fire
held the candlestick, while we, without much ceremony
of undressing, disposed ourselves upon our
spruce-twig couch; and Fire watched over our
slumbers, crouching now as if some stealthy step
were approaching, now lifting up its head and
peering across the river into some recess where the
water gleamed and rustled under dark shadows,
and now sending far and wide over the stream and
the clearing and into every cleft of the forest a
penetrating illumination, a blaze of light, death to
all treacherous ambush. So Fire watched while
we slept, and when safety came with the earliest
gray of morning, it, too, covered itself with ashes
and slept.

14. CHAPTER XIV.
HOMEWARD.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful is dawn in the
woods. Sweet the first opalescent stir, as if the
vanguard sunbeams shivered as they dashed along
the chilly reaches of night. And the growth of
day, through violet and rose and all its golden
glow of promise, is tender and tenderly strong, as
the deepening passions of dawning love. Presently
up comes the sun very peremptory, and says to
people, “Go about your business! Laggards not
allowed in Maine! Nothing here to repent of, while
you lie in bed and curse to-day because it cannot
shake off the burden of yesterday; all clear the
past here; all serene the future: into it at once!”

Birch was ready for us. Objects we travel on,
if horses, often stampede or are stampeded; if
wagons, they break down; if shanks, they stiffen;
if feet, they chafe. No such trouble befalls Birch;
leak, however, it will, as ours did this morning.
We gently beguiled it into the position taken tearfully
by unwhipped little boys, when they are
about to receive birch. Then, with a firebrand, the
pitch of the seams was easily persuaded to melt
and spread a little over the leaky spot, and Birch
was sound as a drum.

Staunch and sound Birch needed to be, for presently
Penobscot, always a skittish young racer, began

to grow lively after he had shaken off the
weighty shadow of Katahdin, and, kicking up his
heels, went galloping down hill, so furiously that
we were at last, after sundry frantic plunges, compelled
to get off his back before worse befell us.
In the balmy morning we made our first portage
through a wood of spruces. How light our firkin
was growing! its pork, its hard-tack, and its condiments
were diffused among us three, and had
passed into muscle. Lake Degetus, as pretty a
pocket lake as there is, followed the carry. Next
came Lake Ambajeejus, larger, but hardly less lovely.
Those who dislike long names may use its
shorter Indian title, Umdo. We climbed a granite
crag draped with moss long as the beard of a
Druid, — a crag on the south side of Ambajeejus, or
Umdo. Thence we saw Katahdin, noble as ever,
unclouded in the sunny morning, near, and yet enchantingly
vague, with the blue sky which surrounded
it. It was still an isolate pyramid rising
with no effect from the fair blue lakes and the fair
green sea of the birch-forest, — a brilliant sea of
woods, gay as the shallows of ocean shot through
with sunbeams and sunlight reflected upward from
golden sands.

We sped along all that exquisite day, best of all
our poetic voyage. Sometimes we drifted and
basked in sunshine, sometimes we lingered in the
birchen shade; we paddled from river to lake, from
lake to river again; the rapids whirled us along,
surging and leaping under us with magnificent gallop;

frequent carries struck in, that we might not
lose the forester in the waterman. It was a fresh
world that we traversed on our beautiful riverpath,
— new as if no other had ever parted its overhanging
bowers.

At noon we floated out upon Lake Pemadumcook,
the largest bulge of the Penobscot, and irregular
as the verb To Be. Lumbermen name it
Bammydumcook: Iglesias insisted upon this as the
proper reading; and as he was the responsible
man of the party, I accepted it. Woods, woody
hills, and woody mountains surround Bammydumcook.
I have no doubt parts of it are pretty,
and will be famous in good time; but we saw little.
By the time we were fairly out in the lake and
away from the sheltering shore, a black squall to
windward, hiding all the West, warned us to fly,
for birches swamp in squalls. We deemed that
Birch, having brought us through handsomely, deserved
a better fate: swamped it must not be. We
plied paddle valiantly, and were almost safe behind
an arm of the shore when the storm overtook us,
and in a moment more, safe, with a canoe only half-full
of Bammydumcook water.

It is easy to speak in scoffing tone; but when
that great roaring blackness sprang upon us, and
the waves, showing their white teeth, snarled
around, we were far from being in the mood to
scoff. It is impossible to say too much of the
charm of this gentle scenery, mingled with the
charm of this adventurous sailing. And then there

were no mosquitoes, no alligators, no serpents
uncomfortably hugging the trees, no miasmas lurking
near; and blueberries always. Dust there was
none, nor the things that make dust. But Iglesias
and I were breathing AIR, — Air sweet, tender,
strong, and pure as an ennobling love. It was a
day very happy, for Iglesias and I were near what
we both love almost best of all the dearly-beloveds.
It is such influence as this that rescues the thought
and the hand of an artist from enervating mannerism.
He cannot be satisfied with vague blotches
of paint to convey impressions so distinct and vivid
as those he is forced to take direct from a Nature
like this. He must be true and powerful.

The storm rolled by and gave us a noble view of
Katahdin, beyond a broad, beautiful scope of water,
and rising seemingly directly from it. We fled before
another squall, over another breadth of Bammydumcook,
and made a portage around a great
dam below the lake. The world should know that
at this dam the reddest, spiciest, biggest, thickest
wintergreen-berries in the world are to be found,
beautiful as they are good.

Birch had hitherto conducted himself with perfect
propriety. I, the novice, had acquired such
entire confidence in his stability of character that I
treated him with careless ease, and never listened
to the warnings of my comrades that he would
serve me a trick. Cancut navigated Birch through
some white water below the dam, and Birch went
curveting proudly and gracefully along, evidently

feeling his oats. When Iglesias and I came to embark,
I, the novice, perhaps a little intoxicated
with wintergreen-berries, stepped jauntily into the
laden boat. Birch, alas! failed me. He tilted; he
turned; he took in Penobscot, — took it in by the
quart, by the gallon, by the barrel; he would have
sunk without mercy, had not Iglesias and Cancut
succeeded in laying hold of a rock and restoring
equilibrium. I could not have believed it of Birch.
I was disappointed, and in consternation; and if I
had not known how entirely it was Birch's fault
that everybody was ducked and everybody now
had a wet blanket, I should have felt personally
foolish. I punished myself for another's fault and
my own inexperience by assuming the wet blankets
as my share at the next carry. I suppose few of
my readers imagine how many pounds of water a
blanket can absorb.

After camps at Katahdin any residence in the
woods without a stupendous mountain before the
door would have been tame. It must have been
this, and not any wearying of sylvan life, that
made us hasten to reach the outermost log-house
at the Millinoket carry before nightfall. The sensation
of house and in-door life would be a new
one, and so satisfying in itself that we should not
demand beautiful objects to meet our first blink of
awakening eyes.

An hour before sunset, Cancut steered us toward
a beach, and pointed out a vista in the woods, evidently
artificial, evidently a road trodden by feet

and hoofs, and ruled by parallel wheels. A road is
one of the kindliest gifts of brother man to man: if
a path in the wilderness, it comes forward like a
friendly guide offering experience and proposing a
comrade dash deeper into the unknown world; if
a highway, it is the great, bold, sweeping character
with which civilization writes its autograph upon a
continent. Leaving our plunder on the beach, beyond
the reach of plunderers, whose great domain
we were about to enter, we walked on toward the
first house, compelled at parting to believe, that,
though we did not love barbarism less, we loved
civilization more. In the morning, Cancut should,
with an ox-cart, bring Birch and our traps over
the three miles of the carry.

15. CHAPTER XV.
OUT OF THE WOODS.

What could society do without women and children?
Both we found at the first house, twenty
miles from the second. The children buzzed about
us; the mother milked for us one of Maine's vanguard
cows. She baked for us bread, fresh bread,
— such bread! not staff of life, — life's vaulting-pole.
She gave us blueberries with cream of cream.
Ah, what a change! We sat on chairs, at a table,

and ate from plates. There was a table-cloth, a
salt-cellar made of glass, of glass never seen at
camps near Katahdin. There was a sugar-bowl, a
milk-jug, and other paraphernalia of civilization, including
— O memories of Joseph Bourgogne! — a
dome of baked beans, with a crag of pork projecting
from the apex. We partook decorously, with
controlled elbows, endeavoring to appear as if we
were accustomed to sit at tables and manage plates.
The men, women, and children of Millinoket were
hospitable and delighted to see strangers, and the
men, like all American men in the summer before a
Presidential election, wanted to talk politics. Katahdin's
last full-bodied appearance was here; it
rises beyond a breadth of black forest, a bulkier
mass, but not so symmetrical as from the southern
points of view. We slept that night on a featherbed,
and took cold for want of air, beneath a
roof.

By the time we had breakfasted, Cancut arrived
with Birch on an ox-sledge. Here our well-beloved
west branch of the Penobscot, called of yore
Norimbagua, is married to the east branch, and of
course by marriage loses his identity, by and by,
changing from the wild, free, reckless rover of the
forest to a tamish family-man style of river, useful
to float rafts and turn mills. However, during the
first moments of the honeymoon, the happy pair,
Mr. Penobscot and Miss Milly Noket, now a unit
under the marital name, are gay enough, and glide
along bowery reaches and in among fair islands,

with infinite endearments and smiles, making the
world very sparkling and musical there. By and
by they fall to romping, and, to avoid one of their
turbulent frolics, Cancut landed us, as he supposed,
on the mainland, to lighten the canoe. Just
as he was sliding away down-stream, we discovered
that he had left us upon an island in the midst of
frantic, impassable rapids. “Stop, stop, John Gilpin!”
and luckily he did stop, otherwise he would
have gone on to tide-water, ever thinking that we
were before him, while we, with our forest appetites,
would have been glaring hungrily at each
other, or perhaps drawing lots for a cannibal doom.
Once again, as we were shooting a long rapid, a
table-top rock caught us in mid-current. We were
wrecked. It was critical. The waves swayed us
perilously this way and that. Birch would be full
of water, or overturned, in a moment. Small
chance for a swimmer in such maelstroms! All
this we saw, but had no time to shudder at. Aided
by the urgent stream, we carefully and delicately
— for a coarse movement would have been death
— wormed our boat off the rock, and went fleeting
through a labyrinth of new perils, onward, with a
wild exhilaration, like galloping through prairie on
fire. Of all the high distinctive national pleasures
of America, chasing buffalo, stump-speaking, and
the like, there is none so intense as shooting rapids
in a birch. Whenever I recall our career down
the Penobscot, a longing comes over me to repeat
it.

We dropped down stream without further adventures.
We passed the second house, the first
village, and other villages, very white and wide-awake,
melodiously named Nickertow, Pattagumpus,
and Mattascunk. We spent the first night at
Mattawamkeag. We were again elbowed at a tavern
table, and compelled to struggle with real and
not ideal pioneers for fried beefsteak and soggy
doughboys. The last river day was tame, but not
tiresome. We paddled stoutly by relays, stopping
only once, at the neatest of farm-houses, to lunch
on the most airy-substantial bread and baked apples
and cream. It is surprising how confidential a
traveller always is on the subject of his gastronomic
delights. He will have the world know how
he enjoyed his dinner, perhaps hoping that the
world by sympathy will enjoy its own.

Late in the afternoon of our eighth day from
Greenville, Moosehead Lake, we reached the end
of birch-navigation, the great mill-dams of Indian
Oldtown, near Bangor. Acres of great pine logs,
marked three crosses and a dash, were floating here
at the boom; we saw what Maine men supposed
timber was made for. According to the view acted
upon at Oldtown, Senaglecouna has been for a
century or centuries training up its lordly pines,
that gang-saws, worked by Penobscot, should
shriek through their helpless cylinders, gnashing
them into boards and chewing them into sawdust.

Poor Birch! how out of its element it looked,

hoisted on a freight-car and travelling by rail to
Bangor! There we said adieu to Birch and Cancut.
Peace and plenteous provender be with him! Journeys
make friends or foes; and we remember our
fat guide, not as one who from time to time just
did not drown us, but as the jolly comrade of eight
days crowded with novelty and beauty, and fine,
vigorous, manly life.