Penobscot Bay, Maine.
1896
June 27
  Clear & warm with S.E. to S.W. wind, light in the forenoon, fresh
in the afternoon.
  We started at 8 o'clock for Heron Island. It was nearly dead
calm at first, later the wind came ahead and we had to beat
most of the way making slow progress and not reaching our
destination until nearly noon.
  Heron Island. About 50 acres, nearly equally divided into open
sheep pasture and woods, the pasture covered with grass close cropped
by the numerous sheep, with a tall dark green, round-stemmed sedge growing in some of the hollows
and, near the cove where we landed, a bed of irises 30 or 40 yards
long by 8 or 10 inch & in full bloom. There were a few balsams growing
in clusters or singly scattered over the open and some very large & old
stumps of yellow birches that showed marks of the axe. Near the
shore the ground was rocky & sloping, elsewhere remarkably level, smooth
& free from rocks. The greatest elevation above the tide level cannot be more
than 15 or 20 feet & possibly no more than 10 feet.
  The woods throw several points & clusters of trees or wooded islands
out into the open but throughout most of their extent the growth
is dense and uniform and chiefly of yellow birches & balsams (I
did not see a single spruce) from 12 or 15 to 25 or 30 feet in height.
To some extent these trees are intermingled but in most places
the growth is chiefly or wholly one or the other species, the
birches being chiefly confined to the centre of the woods & the balsams
forming a broad belt around them. The birches are small and
stunted-looking but not especially peculiar in shape. The balsams
on the other hand are conspicuously misshapen being especially broad
& flat at the tops where the uppermost lateral branches often have a total
spread of 12 or 15 feet forming an almost perfectly level and remarkably
dense platform of  interlaced twigs and [delete]covered with dense[/delete] foliage.