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 goes out the birch comes in ; the raco of 

 men succeeds the race of giants. This tree has great 

 stay-at-home virtues. Let the sombre, aspiring, mys- 

 terious 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. I 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 



