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

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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 fellowlumbermen
treat lakes as log-puddles and raftdepots.
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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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