Lake Umbagog
1907
August
  The road leading from Upton to Errol first
descends a long hill from which most of the wider
reached and larger coves of Umbagog may be clearly traced.
At the foot of the hill it crosses the start line into 
Cambridge, New Hampshire, where it draws nearer and nearer
to the lake and finally skirts its shores rather closely
affording several wide and impressive views of its south
arm and many attractive glympses of blue water seen
between or just above the intervening trees. Cambridge,
when I first visited it, was a pitifully poor and
sparsely populated little town containing less than a
dozen houses and barely enough adult male inhabitants
to administer its public affairs. Yet there was then
a school house and the one and only road was not
wholly neglected. Now there are almost no permanent
inhabitants for all the land with the exception of a 
single farm (that at Lakeside) has passed into the 
hands of a powerful timber company by whom most
of the taxes are paid and the road and its bridges
kept in repair. The sides of the road are mown at
irregular times and intervals to keep back the ever encroaching
trees and bushes. The open spaces thus maintained vary
in width from four or five feet to almost as many yards.
They look bare and desolate enough in spring save where
there are mossy banks or where the purple and the painted
trilliums display their showy blossoms among the tangle
of wild grasses, rank weeds and matted ferns which the
heavy snows of winter have crushed to earth and the action 
of sunlight, of frost and of moisture bleached or blackened.
But by midsummer all this unsightly wreckage becomes
over topped and concealed by frost growths of the most varied