THE MAINE WOODS. 
ing for six weeks as far as the Canada line, and had let 
their beards grow. They had the skin of a beaver, which 
they had recently caught, stretched on an oval hoop, 
though the fur was not good at that season. I talked 
with one of them, telling him that I had come all this 
distance partly to see where the white-pine, the Eastern 
stuff of which our houses are built, grew, but that on this 
and a previous excursion into another part of Maine I 
had found it a scarce tree; and I asked him where I 
must look for it. With a smile, he answered, that he 
could hardly tell me. However, he said that he had 
found enough to employ two teams the next winter in a 
place where there was thought to be none left. What 
was considered a “ tip-top ” tree now was hot looked at 
twenty years ago, when he first went into the business; 
but they succeeded very well now with what was con¬ 
sidered quite inferior timber then. The explorer used 
to cut into a tree higher and higher up, to see if it was 
false-hearted, and if there was a rotten heart as big as 
his arm, he let it alone; but now they cut such a tree, 
and sawed it all around the rot, and it made the very 
best of boards, for in such a case they were never shaky. 
One connected with lumbering operations at Bangor 
told me that the largest pine belonging to his firm, cut 
the previous winter, “ scaled ” in the woods four thousand 
five hundred feet, and was worth ninety dollars in the 
log at the Bangor boom in Oldtown. They cut a road 
three and a half miles long.for this tree alone. He 
thought that the principal locality for the white-pine that 
came down the Penobscot now was at the head of the 
East Branch and the Allegash, about Webster Stream 
and Eagle and Chamberlain Lakes. Much timber has 
been stolen from the public lands. (Pray, what kind of 
