KTAADN. 
79 
the other. In the progress of degradation the distinction 
of races is soon lost. Neptune at first was only anxious 
to know what we “ kill,” seeing some partridges in the 
hands of one of the party, but we had assumed too 
much anger to permit of a reply. We thought Indians 
had some honor before. But — “ Me been sick. O, 
me unwell now. You make bargain, then me go.” 
They had in fact been delayed so long by a drunken 
frolic at the Five Islands, and they had not yet recov¬ 
ered from its effects. They had some young musquash 
in their canoes, which they dug out of the banks with 
a hoe, for food, not for their skins, for musquash are their 
principal food on these expeditions. So they went on 
up the Millinocket, and w r e kept down the bank of the 
Penobscot, after recruiting ourselves with a draught of 
Tom’s beer, leaving Tom at his home. 
Thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge 
of the wilderness, on Indian Millinocket stream, in a 
new world, far in the dark of a continent, and have a 
flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to 
the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it 
were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive 
man. Yet he shall spend a sunny day, and in this cen¬ 
tury be my contemporary; perchance shall read some 
scattered leaves of literature, and sometimes talk with 
me. Why read history, then, if the ages and the gen¬ 
erations are now ? He lives three thousand years deep 
into time, an age not yet described by poets. Can you 
well go further back in history than this ? Ay ! ay! — 
for there turns up but now into the mouth of Millinocket 
stream a still more ancient and primitive man, whose 
history is not brought down even to the former. In a 
bark vessel sewn with the roots of the spruce, with 
