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 vaultingpole.
She gave us blueberries with cream of cream.
Ah, what a change! We sat on chairs, at a table,

[figure description] Page 116.[end figure description]

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,

[figure description] Page 117.[end figure description]

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.

[figure description] Page 118.[end figure description]

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,

[figure description] Page 119.[end figure description]

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.

[figure description] Blank Page.[end figure description]