VI 



A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH 



rpHE 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 deciduous trees. But the birch 

 abounds. Indeed, when the pine goes out the birch 

 comes in; the race of men succeeds the 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. 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 



