154 
THE MAINE WOODS. 
We visited Veazie’s mills, just below the Island, where 
were sixteen sets of saws, — some gang saws, sixteen in 
a gang, not to mention circular saws. On one side, they 
were hauling the logs up an inclined plane by water¬ 
power ; on the other, passing out the boards, planks, and 
sawed timber, and forming them into rafts. The trees 
were literally drawn and quartered there. In forming 
the rafts, they use the lower three feet of hard-wood 
saplings, which have a crooked and knobbed but-end, for 
bolts, passing them up through holes bored in the corners 
and sides of the rafts, and keying them. In another 
apartment they were making fence-slats, such as stand 
all over New England, out of odds and ends, — and it 
may be that I saw where the picket-fence behind which 
I dwell at home came from. I was surprised to find a 
boy collecting the long edgings of boards as fast as cut 
off, and thrusting them down a hopper, where they were 
ground up beneath the mill, that they might be out of the 
way; otherwise they accumulate in vast piles by the side 
of the building, increasing the danger from fire, or, float¬ 
ing off, they obstruct the river. This was not only a 
saw-mill, but a grist-mill, then. The inhabitants of Old- 
town, Stillwater, and Bangor cannot suffer for want of 
kindling stuff, surely. Some get their living exclusively 
by picking up the drift-wood and selling it by the cord 
in the winter. In one place I saw where an Irishman, 
who keeps a team and a man for the purpose, had cov¬ 
ered the shore for a long distance with regular piles, and 
I was told that he had sold twelve hundred dollars’ worth 
in a year. Another, who lived by the shore, told me 
that he got all the material of his out-buildings and fences 
from the river; and in that neighborhood I perceived 
that this refuse wood was frequently used instead of 
