CKESUNCOOK. 
89 
monly confined to wet ground. There were very few 
flowers, even allowing for the lateness of the season. It 
chanced that I saw no asters in bloom along the road for 
fifty miles, though they were so abundant then in Massa¬ 
chusetts, — except in one place one or two of the Aster 
acuminatus, — and no golden-rods till within twenty 
miles of Monson, where I saw a three-ribbed one. 
There were many late buttercups, however, and the 
two fire-weeds, Erechthites and Epilobium, commonly 
where there had been a burning, and at last the pearly 
everlasting. I noticed occasionally very long troughs 
which supplied the road with water, and my companion 
said that three dollars annually were granted by the 
State to one man in each school-district, who provided 
and maintained a suitable water-trough by the road-side, 
for the use of ^travellers, — a piece of intelligence as 
refreshing to me as the water itself. That legislature 
did not sit in vain. It was an Oriental act, which made 
me wish that I was still farther down East, — another 
Maine law, which I hope we may get in Massachusetts. 
That State is banishing bar-rooms from its highways, 
and conducting the mountain-springs thither. 
The country was first decidedly mountainous in Gar¬ 
land, Sangerville, and onwards, twenty-five or thirty 
miles from Bangor. At Sangerville, where we stopped 
at mid-afternoon to warm and dry ourselves, the land¬ 
lord told us that he had found a wilderness where we 
found him. At a fork in the road between Abbot and 
Monson, about twenty miles from Moosehead Lake, I 
saw a guide-post surmounted by a pair of Moose-horns, 
spreading four or five feet, with the word “ Monson 
painted on one blade, and the name of some other town 
on the other. They are sometimes used for ornamental 
