66 
THE MAINE WOODS. 
ests, and lakes, and streams, gleaming in the sun, some 
of them emptying into the East Branch. There were 
also new mountains in sight in that direction. Now and 
then some small bird of the sparrow family would flit 
away before me, unable to command its course, like a 
fragment of the gray rock blown off by the wind. 
I found my companions where I had left them, on the 
side of the peak, gathering the mountain cranberries, 
which filled every crevice between the rocks, together 
with blueberries, which had a spicier flavor the higher 
up they grew, but were not the less agreeable to our 
palates. When the country is settled, and roads are 
made, these cranberries will perhaps become an article 
of commerce. From this elevation, just on the skirts of 
the clouds, we could overlook the country, west and 
south, for a hundred miles. There it was, the State of 
Maine, which we had seen on the map, but not much 
like that, — immeasurable forest for the sun to shine on, 
that eastern stuff we hear of in Massachusetts. No 
clearing, no house. It did not look as if a solitary trav¬ 
eller had cut so much as a walking-stick there. Count¬ 
less lakes, — Moosehead in the southwest, forty miles 
long by ten wide, like a gleaming silver platter at the 
end of the table; Chesuncook, eighteen long by three 
wide, without an island; Millinocket, on the south, with 
its hundred islands ; and a hundred others without a 
name; and mountains also, whose names, for the most 
part, are known only to the Indians. The forest looked 
like a firm grass sward, and the effect of these lakes in 
its midst has been well compared, by one w r ho has since 
visited this same spot, to that of a “ mirror broken into a 
thousand fragments, and wildly scattered over the grass, 
reflecting the full blaze of the sun.” It was a large 
