Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 by Various

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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 nought. 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 grave-stone peddler. 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.

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 river-path,--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.

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 feather-bed, 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 tidewater, 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 maelstroems! 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 suppose
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. END.

* * * * *

A WOMAN.

Not perfect, nay! but full of tender wants.--THE PRINCESS

I sat by my window sewing, one bright autumn day, thinking much of
twenty other things, and very little of the long seam that slipped away
from under my fingers slowly, but steadily, when I heard the front-door
open with a quick push, and directly into my open door entered Laura
Lane, with a degree of impetus that explained the previous sound in the
hall. She threw herself into a chair before me, flung her hat on the
floor, threw her shawl across the window-sill, and looked at me without
speaking: in fact, she was quite too much out of breath to speak.

I was used to Laura's impetuousness; so I only smiled and said, "Good
morning."

"Oh!" said Laura, with a long breath, "I have got something to tell you,
Sue."

"That's nice," said I; "news is worth double here in the country; tell
me slowly, to prolong the pleasure."

"You must guess first. I want to have you try your powers for once;
guess, do!"

"Mr. Lincoln defeated?"

"Oh, no,--at least not that I know of; all the returns from this State
are not in yet, of course not from the others; besides, do you think I'd
make such a fuss about politics?"

"You might," said I, thinking of all the beautiful and brilliant women
that in other countries and other times had made "fuss" more potent than
Laura's about politics.

"But I shouldn't," retorted she.

"Then there is a new novel out?"

"No!" (with great indignation).

"Or the parish have resolved to settle Mr. Hermann?"

"How stupid you are, Sue! Everybody knew that yesterday."

"But I am not everybody."

"I shall have to help you, I see," sighed Laura, half provoked.
"Somebody is going to be married."

"Mademoiselle, the great Mademoiselle!"

Laura stared at me. I ought to have remembered she was eighteen, and
not likely to have read Sevigne. I began more seriously, laying down my
seam.

"Is it anybody I know, Laura?"

"Of course, or you wouldn't care about it, and it would be no fun to
tell you."

"Is it you?"

Laura grew indignant.

"Do you think I should bounce in, in this way, to tell you _I_ was
engaged?"

"Why not? shouldn't you be happy about it?"

"Well, if I were, I should"----

Laura dropped her beautiful eyes and colored.

"The thoughts of youth are long, long
thoughts."

I am sure she felt as much strange, sweet shyness sealing her girlish
lips at that moment as when she came, very slowly and silently, a year
after, to tell me she was engaged to Mr. Hermann. I had to smile and
sigh both.

"Tell me, then, Laura; for I cannot guess."

"I'll tell you the gentleman's name, and perhaps you can guess the
lady's then: it is Frank Addison."

"Frank Addison!" echoed I, in surprise; for this young man was one I
knew and loved well, and I could not think who in our quiet village had
sufficient attraction for his fastidious taste.

He was certainly worth marrying, though he had some faults, being as
proud as was endurable, as shy as a child, and altogether endowed with a
full appreciation, to say the least, of his own charms and merits: but
he was sincere, and loyal, and tender; well cultivated, yet not priggish
or pedantic; brave, well-bred, and high-principled; handsome besides. I
knew him thoroughly; I had held him on my lap, fed him with sugar-plums,
soothed his child-sorrows, and scolded his naughtiness, many a time; I
had stood with him by his mother's dying bed and consoled him by my own
tears, for his mother I loved dearly; so, ever since, Frank had been
both near and dear to me, for a mutual sorrow is a tie that may
bind together even a young man and an old maid in close and kindly
friendship. I was the more surprised at his engagement because I thought
he would have been the first to tell me of it; but I reflected that
Laura was his cousin, and relationship has an etiquette of precedence
above any other social link.

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