THE MAINE WOODS. 
he could not do it. “ Yes/’ said he, “ that ’s the way 
they got a living, like wild fellows, wild as bears. By 
George! I shan’t go into the woods without provision, 
— hard bread, pork, etc.” He had brought on a barrel 
of hard bread and stored it at the carry for his hunting. 
However, though he was a Governor’s son, he had not 
learned to read. 
At one place below this, on the east side, where the 
bank was higher and drier than usual, rising gently from 
the shore to a slight elevation, some one had felled the 
trees over twenty or thirty acres, and left them drying 
in order to burn. This was the only preparation for a 
house between the Moosehead carry and Chesuncook, 
but there was no hut nor inhabitants there yet. The 
pioneer thus selects a site for his house, wdiich will, per¬ 
haps, prove the germ of a town. 
My eyes were all the while on the trees, distinguish¬ 
ing between the black and white spruce and the fir. 
You paddle along in a narrow canal through an endless 
forest, and the vision I have in my mind’s eye, still, is 
of the small, dark, and sharp tops of tall fir and spruce 
trees, and pagoda-like arbor-vitses, crowded together on 
each side, with various hard woods, intermixed. Some 
of the arbor-vitses were at least sixty feet high. The 
hard woods, occasionally occurring exclusively, were less 
wild to my eye. I fancied them ornamental grounds, 
with farm-houses in the rear. The canoe and yellow 
birch, beech, maple, and elm are Saxon and Norman; 
but the spruce and fir, and pines generally, are Indian. 
The soft engravings which adorn the annuals give no 
idea of a stream in such a wilderness as this. The 
rough sketches in Jackson’s Reports on the Geology of 
Maine answer much better. At one place we saw a 
