134 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



terful fellow indeed, for he made me play on the violin in his 

 orchestra. I had had a year's training at it, and he made me sing 

 solos which I had never done before or since. Therefore I fairly 

 judged him a master. He certainly was mightily entertaining. 



From Trenton Point we took by boat a tent and simple camp 

 "outfit" to where Bar Harbor now stands; tied the boat in the 

 bushes about where the steamboat wharf is; and spent some 

 days exploring the island of Mount Desert, then very little 

 known. We camped for the most of the time on Green Moun- 

 tain, where, boy-fashion, we amused ourselves by starting 

 boulders down the steep to hear them crash into the woods be- 

 low. Thence we went to Eagle Lake, built a raft and with our 

 shelter tent managed to sail the length of it ; but near the end 

 of the voyage there came a stout wind, and the waves broke 

 the raft to pieces, so that we lost our effects and had to swim 

 ashore, and make our way ignominiously to our boat and back 

 to our boarding-place. 



This trifling bit of a camp journey in Mount Desert was a 

 great event in my life, for it brought my feet for the first time 

 upon a mountain-top. It is true that the height was trifling, 

 but a matter of fifteen hundred feet or so, and I had seen 

 greater elevations in the distance; but the way to experience a 

 mountain is to climb it with a pack on your back; you then 

 sense its mass in a way that sight does not enable you to do. I 

 have never had this sense of mass so borne in upon me as in this 

 climbing of Green Mountain. I remember how the uniform 

 structure of the elevation corresponded with my text-book 

 knowledge, which led me to seek the outward dip of strata from 

 an axis as the essential feature of such edifices. I came to a fair 

 idea of the truth that it and the associated hills were the re- 

 mains of the crystalline material which had been thrust up into 

 the folded stratified rocks, which had at one time covered the 

 country and had since been eroded by streams and glaciers. 

 Some remnants of this ancient covering I found in the schists 

 about the north shore of the island. 



