“For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number, whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek-teeth of a great lion.

“He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig-tree; he hath made it clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white....

“Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen! howl, O ye vine-dressers!...

“The vine is dried up, and the fig-tree languisheth; the pomegranate-tree, the palm-tree also, and the apple-tree, even all the trees of the field, are withered:  because joy is withered away from the sons of men.”

* * * * *

LIFE IN THE OPEN AIR.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “CECIL DREEME” AND “JOHN BRENT.”

KATAHDIN AND THE PENOBSCOT.

CHAPTER VII.

MOOSEHEAD.

Moosehead Lake is a little bigger than the Lago di Guarda, and therefore, according to our American standard, rather more important.  It is not very grand, not very picturesque, but considerably better than no lake,—­a meritorious mean; not pretty and shadowy, like a thousand lakelets all over the land, nor tame, broad, and sham-oceanic, like the tanks of Niagara.  On the west, near its southern end, is a well-intended blackness and roughness called Squaw Mountain.  The rest on that side is undistinguished pine woods.

Mount Kinneo is midway up the lake, on the east.  It is the show-piece of the region,—­the best they can do for a precipice, and really admirably done.  Kinneo is a solid mass of purple flint rising seven hundred feet upright from the water.  By the side of this block could some Archimedes appear, armed with a suitable “pou sto” and a mallet heavy enough, he might strike fire to the world.  Since percussion-guns and friction cigar-lighters came in, flint has somewhat lost its value; and Kinneo is of no practical use at present.  We cannot allow inutilities in this world.  Where is the Archimedes?  He could make a handsome thing of it by flashing us off with a spark into a new system of things.

Below this dangerous cliff on the lake-bank is the Kinneo House, where fishermen and sportsmen may dwell, and kill or catch, as skill or fortune favors.  The historical success of all catchers and killers is well balanced, since men who cannot master facts are always men of imagination, and it is as easy for them to invent as for the other class to do.  Boston men haunt Kinneo.  For a hero who has not skill enough or imagination enough to kill a moose stands rather in Nowhere with Boston fashion.  The tameness of that pleasant little capital makes its belles ardent for tales of wild adventure.  New-York women are less exacting; a few of them, indeed, like a dash of the adventurous in their lover; but most of them are business-women, fighting their way out of vulgarity into style, and romance is an interruption.