CHESUNCOOK 
157 
It may be that the children of Greenville, at the foot 
of Moosehead Lake, who surely are not likely to be 
scared by an owl, are referred to the valley of the Ohio 
to get an idea of a forest; but they would not know 
what to do with their moose, bear, caribou, beaver, etc., 
there. Shall we leave it to an Englishman to inform 
us, that “ in North America, both in the United States 
and Canada, are the most extensive pine-forests in the 
world ” ? The greater part of New Brunswick, the 
northern half of Maine, and adjacent parts of Canada, 
not to mention the northeastern part of New York and 
other tracts farther off, are still covered with an almost 
unbroken pine-forest. 
But Maine, perhaps, will soon be where Massachu¬ 
setts is. A good part of her territory is already as 
bare and commonplace as much of our neighborhood, 
and her villages generally are not so well shaded as 
ours. We seem to think that the earth must go through 
the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by 
man. Consider Nahant, the resort of all the fashion 
of Boston, — which peninsula I saw but indistinctly in 
the twilight, when I steamed by it, and thought that it 
was unchanged since the discovery. John Smith de¬ 
scribed it in 1614 as “the Mattahunts, two pleasant isles 
of groves, gardens, and cornfields ”; and others tell us 
that it was once well wooded, and even furnished tim¬ 
ber to build the wharves of Boston. Now it is difficult 
to make a tree grow there, and the visitor comes away 
with a vision of Mr. Tudor’s ugly fences, a rod high, 
designed to protect a few pear-shrubs. And what are 
we coming to in our Middlesex towns? —-a bald, staring 
town-house, or meeting-house, and a bare liberty-pole, 
as leafless as it is fruitless, for all I can see. We shall 
