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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

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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

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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.”

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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

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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 guestchamber,
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.

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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 massmeetings.
There was no neighborhood that might

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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

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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.

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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

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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.