THE MAINE WOODS. 
26 
pan, and an axe, to be obtained at the last house, would 
complete our outfit. 
We were soon out of McCauslin’s clearing, and in the 
ever green woods again. The obscure trail made by the 
two settlers above, which even the woodman is some¬ 
times puzzled to discern, erelong crossed a narrow, open 
strip in the woods overrun with weeds, called the Burnt 
Land, where a fire had raged formerly, stretching north¬ 
ward nine or ten miles, to Millinocket Lake. At the 
end of three miles, we reached Shad Pond, or Nolisee- 
mack, an expansion of the river. Hodge, the Assistant 
State Geologist, who passed through this on the 25th 
of June, 1837, says, “We pushed our boat through 
an acre or more of buck-beans, which had taken root 
at the bottom, and bloomed above the surface in the 
greatest profusion and beauty.” Thomas Fowler’s house 
is four miles from McCauslin’s, on the shore of the pond, 
at the mouth of the Millinocket Fiver, and eight miles 
from the lake of the same name, on the latter stream. 
This lake affords a more direct course to Ktaadn, but 
we preferred to follow the Penobscot and the Pamadum- 
cook lakes. Fowler was just completing a new log-hut, 
and was sawing out a window through the logs, nearly 
two feet thick, when we arrived. He had begun to paper 
his house with spruce-bark, turned inside out, which had 
a good effect, and was in keeping with the circumstances. 
Instead of water we got here a draught of beer, which, 
it was allowed, would be better; clear and thin, but 
strong and stringent as the cedar-sap. It was as if we 
sucked at the very teats of Nature’s pine-clad bosom in 
these parts, — the sap of all Millinocket botany commin¬ 
gled,— the topmost, most fantastic, and spiciest sprays 
of the primitive wood, and whatever invigorating and 
