THE ALLEGASH AND EAST BRANCH. 
201 
We carried a part of the baggage about Pine Stream 
Palls, while the Indian went down in the canoe. A 
Bangor merchant had told us that two men in his em¬ 
ploy were drowned some time ago while passing these 
falls in a bateau, and a third clung to a rock all night, 
and was taken off in the morning. There w T ere mag¬ 
nificent great purple-fringed orchises on this carry and 
the neighboring shores. I measured the largest canoe- 
birch which I saw in this journey near the end of the 
carry. It was 14J- feet in circumference at two feet from 
the ground, but at' five feet divided into three parts. The 
canoe-birches thereabouts were commonly marked by 
conspicuous dark spiral ridges, with a groove between, so 
that I thought at first that they had been struck by light¬ 
ning, but, as the Indian said, it was evidently caused by 
the grain of the tree. He cut a small, woody knob, as 
big as a filbert, from the trunk of a fir, apparently an old 
balsam vesicle filled with wood, which he said was good 
medicine. 
After we had embarked and gone half a mile, my 
companion remembered that he had left his knife, and 
we paddled back to get it, against the strong and swift 
current. This taught us the difference between going 
up and down the stream, for while we were working 
our way back a quarter of a mile, we should have gone 
down a mile and a half at least. So we landed, and 
while he and the Indian were gone back for it, I 
watched the motions of the foam, a kind of white water- 
fowl near the shore, forty or fifty rods below. It alter¬ 
nately appeared and disappeared behind the rock, being 
carried round by an eddy. Even this semblance of life 
was interesting on that lonely river. 
Immediately below these falls was the Chesuncook 
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