250 
THE MAINE WOODS. 
having already carried his canoe over, and baked his 
loaf, had nothing so interesting and pressing to do as to 
observe our transit. He had been out a month or more 
alone. How much more wild and adventurous his life 
than that of the hunter in Concord woods, who gets back 
to his house and the mill-dam every night! Yet they in 
the towns who have wild oats to sow commonly sow them 
on cultivated and comparatively exhausted ground. And 
as for the rowdy world in the large cities, so little enter¬ 
prise has it that it never adventures in this direction, but 
like vermin clubs together in alleys and drinking-saloons, 
its highest accomplishment, perchance, to run beside a 
fire-engine and throw brickbats. But the former is com¬ 
paratively an independent and successful man, getting 
his living in a way that he likes, without disturbing 
his human neighbors. How much more respectable 
also is the life of the solitary pioneer or settler in these, 
or any woods, — having real difficulties, not of his own 
creation, drawing his subsistence directly from nature, — 
than that of the helpless multitudes in the towns who de¬ 
pend on gratifying the extremely artificial wants of so¬ 
ciety and are thrown out of employment by hard times! 
Here for the first time we found the raspberries really 
plenty, — that is, on passing the height of land between 
the Allegash and the East Branch of the Penobscot; 
the same was true of the blueberries. 
Telos Lake, the head of the St. John on this side, and 
Webster Pond, the head of the East Branch of the Penob¬ 
scot, are only about a mile apart, and they are connected 
by a ravine, in which but little digging was required to 
make the water of the former, which is the highest, flow 
into the latter. This canal, which is something less than 
a mile long and about four rods wide, was made a few 
