1907
August 7
(No 3)
Lake Umbagog
likely to be surprised within close range of gun or opera
glass for even the shyest of them are seldom warned of the
approach of a skillfully paddled canoe until it rounds the turn,
perhaps within a few yards of where they are basking in the
sun on some sand bar or swimming or wading in the shallow water.
  All this may be said with equal truth of other rivers
in other lands but the Cambridge has a charm peculiarly its own.
This I find difficult to analyze and quite impossible to
describe. For one thing it has sweet, undefiled water - by no
means a common condition in these days when saw-mills,
pulp mills and sewers are permitted to clog and pollute so very
many of our water courses. For another its pools and reaches
are brightened in summer by golden water lilies of unusual
beauty, in autumn by rafts of brilliantly-tinted drifting leaves.
Nor is it often that one can find a stream so narrow and
winding which can be so easily and safely navigated by the canoeman.
  Its greatest width does not exceed fifteen or twenty yards
and in many places is not half that number of feet. Yet even
when the water is at its lowest a light boat may be paddled up
to the Forks and beyond without difficulty.
  As I glance over what I have just written I perceive 
that it quite fails to do the Cambridge River justice.
Is its charm too ethereal and elusive to be expressed in
words? Or should I have mentioned the alternating lights
and shadows that play on its placid waters; the gently
curving bars of silvery sand below its sharper turns;
and the beds of luxuriant, graceful ferns, of feathery, swaying grasses and
of flowering plants of various kinds, that line its
banks? The broad crested elms and narrow spire-shaped 
spruces and balsams that rise against the sky above all
this wealth of herbaceous vegetation, bordering the shining pathway