150 Rhodora. . [June 
hind us we shut out our nearest post office, our railroad station, and 
civilization, for two whole weeks. "We have now, since our return, 
no difficulty in identifying this point also as that described by Ham- 
lin in his paper (p. 322) where “the way turning directly west.... 
the Third of the Sixth (now the plantation of Stacyville ) changes 
from a smooth highway to the worst of cart-tracks.” My note for the 
afternoon says: * We had a rough ride on the buck-board, but it was 
mostly walking." We walked both for comfort and to botanize. 
There is, after all, little collecting to be done (unless one is look- 
ing for mushrooms) in the sombre shades of a Maine forest, so we 
easily kept ahead of the horses, and it was long before sunset that 
we emerged in a clearing upon the river bank at the * Hunt Place." 
. As it was now raining we sought shelter in the dilapidated old house 
and waited for the wagon to come up. This same “Hunt Place” 
was visited by Thoreau, who, on August 1, 1857, came down the 
river in his canoe, and called at the house. He says “ We found that 
we had camped about a mile above Hunt's, which is on the East bank 
and is the last house for those who ascend Katahdin on this side.... 
We stopped to get some sugar, but found that the family had moved 
away, and the house was unoccupied, except temporarily by some 
men who were getting the hay. They told me that the road to Katah- 
din left the river eight miles above; also that perhaps we could get 
some sugar at Fisk's, fourteen miles below. I do not remember that 
we saw the mountain at all from the river." 
We too found the Hunt Place as deserted and desolate as did 
Thoreau more than forty years before, but “the last house for those 
who ascend Katahdin on this side" was now a mile and a half 
further up the River, at Lunksoos. 
The cart-way along the edge of the river was rougher than the 
«tote road " just passed, but we were now bundled up in rubber 
coats and so packed into the buckboard in the rain, that we had to 
submit to the pounding, which we had before avoided by walking. 
Capt. Regers told us that his camp was named from a mountain 
still further up the river. Thoreau spells the name of this mountain 
« Zunxus,’ and says the word means “Indian Devil.” Whether 
appropriate or not to the neighboring mountain, the appellation thus 
translated is wholly out of keeping with the quiet rural beauty of 
this little riverside home; unless indeed it is intended to suggest 
the character of the roads by which the paradise is finally reached. 
