Trail and Camp-Fire 



the name of a lake — Sintamaskin * — which 

 lay some distance beyond the farthest point 

 I had then reached in my brief camping-trips. 

 Names are misleading. This is a country of 

 many lakes, greatly diverse in character and 

 of very varying degrees of beauty ; and I had 

 no reason to suppose that this lake possessed 

 any special charm to distinguish it from the 

 hundreds of others about it. Yet the name 

 lingered in my memory, and in those sudden 

 waves of longing that come to all of us who 

 love the woods, it would recur to me with a 

 strange wild flavor of the far-away northern 

 forest. Gradually, however, it faded from my 

 recollection, and had not been recalled to me 

 until a few days ago, when, as we were set- 

 ting out upon our trip, a friend, familiar with 

 all this region, said : " You'd better go over 

 to Lac Sintamaskin ; " and, after describing it, 

 he added : ** You'll see fine timber there ; you 

 know it has never had a dam on it." Just 

 what this meant can best be realized by those 

 to whom our northeastern wilderness is known. 



* Sintamaskin : the first syllable nasal, like the French saint; ac- 

 cent on the last syllable, which is pronounced as English kin. The 

 Algonquin word is Sattamoihkd, and is said to signify "Shallow 

 River." 



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