KTAADN. 
67 
farm for somebody, when cleared. According to the 
Gazetteer, which was printed before the boundary ques¬ 
tion was settled, this single Penobscot county, in which 
we were, was larger than the whole State of Vermont, 
with its fourteen counties; and this was only a part of 
the wild lands of Maine. We are concerned now, how¬ 
ever, about natural, not political limits. We were about 
eighty miles, as the bird flies, from Bangor, or one hun¬ 
dred and fifteen, as we had rode, and walked, and pad- 
died. We had to console ourselves with the reflection 
that this view was probably as good as that from the 
peak, as far as it went; and what were a mountain with¬ 
out its attendant clouds and mists ? Like ourselves, 
neither Bailey nor Jackson had obtained a clear view 
from the summit*. 
Setting out on our return to the river, still at an early 
hour in the day, we decided to follow the course of the 
torrent, which we supposed to be Murch Brook, as long 
as it would not lead us too far out of our way. We thus 
travelled about four miles in the very torrent itself, con¬ 
tinually crossing and recrossing it, leaping from rock to 
rock, and jumping with the stream down falls of seven 
or eight feet, or sometimes sliding down on our backs in 
a thin sheet of water. This ravine had been the scene 
of an extraordinary freshet in the spring, apparently ac¬ 
companied by a slide from the mountain. It must have 
been filled with a stream of stones and water, at least 
twenty feet above the present level of the torrent. For 
a rod or two, on either side of its channel, the trees were 
barked and splintered up to their tops, the birches bent 
over, twisted, and sometimes finely split, like a stable- 
broom ; some, a foot in diameter, snapped off, and whole 
clumps of trees bent over with the weight of rocks piled 
