CHESUNCOOK. 
93 
he told me that he had lived about this lake twenty or 
thirty years, and yet had not been to the head of it for 
twenty-one years. He faces the other way. The ex¬ 
plorers had a fine new birch on board, larger than ours, 
in which they had come up the Piscataquis from How¬ 
land, and they had had several messes of trout already. 
They were going to the neighborhood of Eagle and 
Chamberlain Lakes, or the head-waters of the St. John, 
and offered to keep us company as far as we went. 
The lake to-day was rougher than I found the ocean, 
either going or returning, and Joe remarked that it 
would swamp his birch. Off Lily Bay it is a dozen 
miles wide, but it is much broken by islands. The 
scenery is not merely wild, but varied and interesting; 
mountains were seen, farther or nearer, on all sides but 
the northwest, their summits now lost in the clouds; 
but Mount Kineo is the principal feature of the lake, 
and more exclusively belongs to it. After leaving 
Greenville, at the foot, which is the nucleus of a town 
some eight or ten years old, you see but three or four 
houses for the whole length of the lake, or about forty 
miles, three of them the public houses at which the 
steamer is advertised to stop, and the shore is an un¬ 
broken wilderness. The prevailing wood seemed to be 
spruce, fir, birch, and rock-maple. You could easily 
distinguish the hard wood from the soft, or “black 
growth,” as it is called, at a great distance, — the for¬ 
mer being smooth, round-topped, and light green, with a 
bowery and cultivated look. 
Mount Kineo, at which the boat touched, is a penin¬ 
sula with a narrow neck, about midway the lake on the 
east side. The celebrated precipice is on the east or 
land side of this, and is so high and perpendicular that 
