CHESUNCOOK. 
123 
one spend some weeks or years in the solitude of this 
vast wilderness with other employments than these, — 
employments perfectly sweet and innocent and enno¬ 
bling? For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or 
sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle. What a 
coarse and imperfect use Indians and hunters make of 
Nature ! No wonder that their race is so soon exter¬ 
minated. I already, and for weeks afterward, felt my 
nature the coarser for this part of my woodland ex¬ 
perience, and was reminded that our life should be 
lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a 
flower. 
With these thoughts, when we reached our camping- 
ground, I decided to leave my companions to continue 
moose-hunting down the stream, while I prepared the 
camp, though they requested me not to chop much nor 
make a large fire, for fear I should scare their game. 
In the midst of the damp fir-wood, high on the mossy 
bank, about nine o’clock of this bright moonlight night, 
I kindled a fire, when they were gone, and, sitting on 
the fir-twigs, within sound of the falls, examined by its 
light the botanical specimens which I had collected that 
afternoon, and wrote down some of the reflections which 
I have here expanded; or I walked along the shore and 
gazed up the stream, where the whole space above the 
falls was filled with mellow light. As I sat before the 
fire on my fir-twig seat, without walls above or around 
me, I remembered how far on every hand that wilder¬ 
ness stretched, before you came to cleared or cultivated 
fields, and wondered if any bear or moose was watching 
the light of my fire; for Nature looked sternly upon me 
on account of the murder of the moose. 
Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see 
