and left them drying in order to burn. This was the only preparation
for a house between the Moosehead carry and Chesuncook, but there
was no hut nor inhabitants there yet. The pioneer thus selects a
site for his house, which will, perhaps, prove the germ of a town.

My eyes were all the while on the trees, distinguishing between the
black and white spruce and the fir. You paddle along in a narrow
canal through an endless forest, and the vision I have in my mind's
eye, still, is of the small dark and sharp tops of tall fir and
spruce trees, and pagoda-like arbor-vitaes, crowded together on each
side, with various hard woods intermixed. Some of the arbor-vitaes
were at least sixty feet high. The hard woods, occasionally
occurring exclusively, were less wild to my eye. I fancied them
ornamental grounds, with farm-houses in the rear. The canoe and
yellow birch, beech, maple, and elm are Saxon and Norman; but the
spruce and fir, and pines generally, are Indian. The soft engravings
which adorn the annuals give no idea of a stream in such a wilderness
as this. The rough sketches in Jackson's Reports on the Geology of
Maine answer much better. At one place we saw a small grove of
slender sapling white-pines, the only collection of pines that I saw
on this voyage. Here and there, however, was a full-grown, tall, and
slender, but defective one, what lumbermen call a _kouchus_ tree,
which they ascertain with their axes, or by the knots. I did not
learn whether this word was Indian or English. It reminded me of the
Greek [Greek: kogchae], a conch or shell, and I amused myself with
fancying that it might signify the dead sound which the trees yield
when struck. All the rest of the pines had been driven off.

[To be continued.]