"a pair of splendid white pelicans' 



CHAPTER III 



IN THE CAPE SABLE WILDERNESS 



Soon were lost in a maze of sluggish and devious waters. 

 Which, like a network of steel, extended in every direction. 

 Over their heads the towering and tenebrous doughs of the cypress 

 Met in a dusky arch, and trailing mosses in mid-air 

 Waved like banners, that hang on the walls of ancient cathedrals. 

 Deathlike the silence seemed, and unbroken, save by the herons. 



Longfellow, " Evangeline." 



IT was a cool, sparkling morning, with a bracing north- 

 erly wind, the twenty-sixth of April, when we shoved the 

 tender over the slipper}^ " soap-flat," and, in boots loaded 

 with the tenacious white clay mud, stood upon the southern- 

 most tip of the mainland of the United States. An almost 

 unbroken, unsurveyed wilderness lay before us, with all its 

 interesting possibilities. A handful of settlers had taken up 

 claims of government land along the shore, cleared a few 



