178 
THE MAINE WOODS. 
made our bed, in order to be ready for foul weather, 
which then threatened us, and for the night. He gath¬ 
ered a large armful of fir twigs, breaking them off, which 
he said were the best for our bed, partly, I thought, 
because they were the largest and could be most rapidly 
collected. It had been raining more or less for four or 
five days, and the wood was even damper than usual, but 
he got dry bark for the fire from the under-side of a dead 
leaning hemlock, which, he said, he could always do. 
This noon his mind was occupied with a law question, 
and I referred him to my companion, who was a lawyer. 
It appeared that he had been buying land lately, (I think 
it was a hundred acres,) but there was probably an 
incumbrance to it, somebody else claiming to have bought 
some grass on it for this year. He wished to know to 
whom the grass belonged, and was told that if the other 
man could prove that he bought the grass before he, 
Polis, bought the land, the former could take it, whether 
the latter knew it or not. To which he only answered, 
“ Strange! ” He went over this several times, fairly sat 
down to it, with his back to a tree, as if he meant to con¬ 
fine us to this topic henceforth; but as he made no head¬ 
way, only reached the jumping-off place of his wonder 
at white men’s institutions after each explanation, we let 
the subject die. 
He said that he had fifty acres of grass, potatoes, &c., 
somewhere above Oldtown, beside some about his house; 
that he hired a good deal of his work, hoeing, &c., and 
preferred white men to Indians, because “they keep 
steady, and know how.” 
After dinner we returned southward along the shore, 
in the canoe, on account of the difficulty of climbing over 
the rocks and fallen trees, and began to ascend the moun- 
