48 AT THE NORTH OF BEARCAMP WATER. 
the ruins of a saw-mill, two or three slab houses, 
and a collapsed stable where the lumbermen’s 
oxen had been kept in the winter nights, years 
ago. In the mill’s time sawdust had covered 
everything; but now the strong, quarrelsome 
blackberry had mastered the sawdust. Our 
guide pointed to a break in the solid wall of 
woods surrounding the mill, so we struggled 
through the blackberry jungle and left the sun¬ 
light behind us. As we entered the forest, 
bird music ceased, few flowers decked the 
ground, — the pallid Indian pipe seeming more 
akin to the fungi than to flowers, — and not a 
squirrel disturbed the quiet of the endless aisles. 
Here and there small brightly colored toadstools 
and the fruit of bunchberry or clintonia lent 
a bit of vermilion, orange, yellow, or lustrous 
metallic blue to the dull brown carpet of the 
woods; or a branch of maple, prematurely 
robbed of its chlorophyll, gleamed in the far-off 
sunlight among the tree-tops. If by chance the 
eye caught a glimpse of the flowers of the rattle¬ 
snake plantain, or of some of the greenish wood 
orchids, it found in them less color than in the 
toadstools and less perfume than in the needles 
of the balsam. 
There extended before us a clearly marked 
passageway between the giant trunks of ancient 
trees. It was the beginning of the old trail. 
