countries are commonly confined to wet ground. There were very few
flowers, even allowing for the lateness of the season. It chanced
that I saw no asters in bloom along the road for fifty miles, though
they were so abundant then in Massachusetts,--except in one place
one or two of the aster acuminatus,--and no golden-rods till within
twenty miles of Monson, where I saw a three-ribbed one. There were
many late buttercups, however, and the two fire-weeds, erechthites
and epilobium, commonly where there had been a burning, and at last
the pearly everlasting. I noticed occasionally very long troughs
which supplied the road with water, and my companion said that three
dollars annually were granted by the State to one man in each
school-district, who provided and maintained a suitable water-trough
by the road-side, for the use of travellers,--a piece of
intelligence as refreshing to me as the water itself. That
legislature did not sit in vain. It was an Oriental act, which made
me wish that I was still farther down East,--another Maine law,
which I hope we may get in Massachusetts. That State is banishing
bar-rooms from its highways, and conducting the mountain-springs
thither.

The country was first decidedly mountainous in Garland, Sangerville,
and onwards, twenty-five or thirty miles from Bangor. At Sangerville,
where we stopped at mid-afternoon to warm and dry ourselves, the
landlord told us that he had found a wilderness where we found him.
At a fork in the road between Abbot and Monson, about twenty miles
from Moosehead Lake, I saw a guide-post surmounted by a pair of
moose-horns, spreading four or five feet, with the word "Monson"
painted on one blade, and the name of some other town on the other.
They are sometimes used for ornamental hat-trees, together with
deers' horns, in front entries; but, after the experience which I