A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH. 
THE traveler and camper-out in’ Maine, unless he 
penetrates its more northern portions, has less reason 
to remember it as a pine-tree State than a birch-tree 
State. The white-pine forests have melted away like 
snow in the spring and gone down stream, leaving 
only patches here and there in the more remote and 
inaccessible parts. The portion of the State I saw — 
the valley of the Kennebec and the woods about 
Moxie Lake — had been shorn of its pine timber-more 
than forty years before, and is now covered with a 
thick growth of spruce and cedar and various decid- 
uous trees. But the birch abounds. Indeed, when 
the pine gues out the birch comes in ; the race of men 
succeeds tho race of giants. This tree has great stay- 
at-home virtues. Let the sombre, aspiring, mysterious 
pine go; the birch has humble every-day uses. In 
Maine, the paper or canoe birch is turned to more 
account than any other tree. J read in Gibbon that 
the natives of ancient Assyria used to celebrate in 
verse or prose the three hundred and sixty uses to 
which the various parts and products of the palm-tree 
were applied. The Maine birch is turned to so many 
accounts that it may well be called the palm of this 
region. Uncle Nathan, our guide, said it was made 
especially for the camper-out ; yes, and for the wood- 
man and frontiersman generally. It is a magazine, a 
furnishing store set up in the wilderness, whose goods 
