208 
THE MAINE WOODS. 
Wild as it was, it was hard for me to get rid of the 
associations of the settlements. Any steady and monot¬ 
onous sound, to which I did not distinctly attend, passed 
for a sound of human industry. The waterfalls which 
I heard were not without their dams and mills to my im¬ 
agination, — and several times I found that I had been re¬ 
garding the steady rushing sound of the wind from over 
the woods beyond the rivers as that of a train of cars, — 
the cars at Quebec. Our minds anywhere, when left to 
themselves, are always thus busily drawing conclusions 
from false premises. 
I asked the Indian to make us a sugar-bowl of birch- 
bark, which he did, using the great knife which dangled 
in a sheath from his belt; but the bark broke at the cor¬ 
ners when he bent it up, and he said it was not good; 
that there was a great difference in this respect between 
the bark of one canoe-birch and that of another, i. e. one 
cracked more easily than another. I used some thin and 
delicate sheets of this bark which he split and cut, in my 
flower-book; thinking it would be good to separate the 
dried specimens from J,he green. 
•** My companion, wishing to distinguish between the 
black and white spruce, asked Polis to show him a twig 
of the latter, which he did at once ? together with the 
black; indeed, he could distinguish them about as far as 
he could see them; but as the two twigs appeared very 
much alike, my companion asked the Indian to point out 
the difference; whereupon the latter, taking the twigs, in¬ 
stantly remarked, as he passed his hand over them succes¬ 
sively in a stroking manner, that the white was rough (i. e. 
the needles stood up nearly perpendicular), but the black 
smooth (i. e. as if bent or combed down). This was an 
obvious difference, both to sight and touch. However, if I 
