Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best?  Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last?  No! no! it is the poet; he it is who makes the truest use of the pine,—­who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane,—­who knows whether its heart is false without cutting into it,—­who has not bought the stumpage of the township on which it stands.  All the pines shudder and heave a sigh when that man steps on the forest floor.  No, it is the poet, who loves them as his own shadow in the air, and lets them stand.  I have been into the lumber-yard, and the carpenter’s shop, and the tannery, and the lampblack-factory, and the turpentine clearing; but when at length I saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, I realized that the former were not the highest use of the pine.  It is not their bones or hide or tallow that I love most.  It is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts.

Ere long, the hunters returned, not having seen a moose, but, in consequence of my suggestions, bringing a quarter of the dead one, which, with ourselves, made quite a load for the canoe.

After breakfasting on moose-meat, we returned down Pine Stream on our way to Chesuncook Lake, which was about five miles distant.  We could see the red carcass of the moose lying in Pine Stream when nearly half a mile off.  Just below the mouth of this stream were the most considerable rapids between the two lakes, called Pine-Stream Falls, where were large flat rocks washed smooth, and at this time you could easily wade across above them.  Joe ran down alone while we walked over the portage, my companion collecting spruce gum for his friends at home, and I looking for flowers.  Near the lake, which we were approaching with as much expectation as if it had been a university,—­for it is not often that the stream of our life opens into such expansions,—­were islands, and a low and meadowy shore with scattered trees, birches, white and yellow, slanted over the water, and maples,—­many of the white birches killed, apparently by inundations.  There was considerable native grass; and even a few cattle—­whose movements we heard, though we did not see them, mistaking them at first for moose—­were pastured there.

On entering the lake, where the stream runs southeasterly, and for some time before, we had a view of the mountains about Katadn, (Katahdinauquoh one says they are called,) like a cluster of blue fungi of rank growth, apparently twenty-five or thirty miles distant, in a southeast direction, their summits concealed by clouds.  Joe called some of them the Souadneunk mountains.  This is the name of a stream there,