If distant, thou dost rise a star
  Whose beams are with my being wrought,
  And curvest all my teeming thought
With sweet attractions from afar.

As a winged ship, in calmest hour,
  Still moves upon the mighty sea
  To some deep ocean melody,
I feel thy spirit and thy power.

CHESUNCOOK

[Continued]

How far men go for the material of their houses!  The inhabitants of the most civilized cities, in all ages, send into far, primitive forests, beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and bear and savage dwell, for their pine-boards for ordinary use.  And, on the other hand, the savage soon receives from cities iron arrow-points, hatchets, and guns to point his savageness with.

The solid and well-defined fir-tops, like sharp and regular spear-heads, black against the sky, gave a peculiar, dark, and sombre look to the forest.  The spruce-tops have a similar, but more ragged outline,—­their shafts also merely feathered below.  The firs were somewhat oftener regular and dense pyramids.  I was struck by this universal spiring upward of the forest evergreens.  The tendency is to slender, spiring tops, while they are narrower below.  Not only the spruce and fir, but even the arbor-vitae and white pine, unlike the soft, spreading second-growth, of which I saw none, all spire upwards, lifting a dense spear-head of cones to the light and air, at any rate, while their branches straggle after as they may; as Indians lift the ball over the heads of the crowd in their desperate game.  In this they resemble grasses, as also palms somewhat.  The hemlock is commonly a tent-like pyramid from the ground to its summit.

After passing through some long rips and by a large island, we reached an interesting part of the river called the Pine-Stream Dead-Water, about six miles below Ragmuff, where the river expanded to thirty rods in width and had many islands in it, with elms and canoe-birches, now yellowing, along the shore, and we got our first sight of Katadn.

Here, about two o’clock, we turned up a small branch three or four rods wide, which comes in on the right from the south, called Pine Stream, to look for moose signs.  We had gone but a few rods before we saw very recent signs along the water’s edge, the mud lifted up by their feet being quite fresh, and Joe declared that they had gone along there but a short time before.  We soon reached a small meadow on the east side, at an angle in the stream, which was for the most part densely covered with alders.  As we were advancing along the edge of this, rather more quietly than usual, perhaps, on account of the freshness of the signs,—­the design being to camp up this stream, if it promised well,—­I heard a slight crackling of twigs deep in the alders, and turned Joe’s attention to it; whereupon he began to push the canoe back rapidly; and we had receded