Kinneo was an old station of Iglesias’s, in those days when he was probing New England for the picturesque.  When the steamer landed, he acted as cicerone, and pointed out to me the main object of interest thereabouts, the dinner-table.  We dined with lumbermen and moose-hunters, scufflingly.

The moose is the lion of these regions.  Near Greenville, a gigantic pair of moose-horns marks a fork in the road.  Thenceforth moose-facts and moose-legends become the staple of conversation.  Moose-meat, combining the flavor of beefsteak and the white of turtle, appears on the table.  Moose-horns with full explanations, so that the buyer can play the part of hunter, are for sale.  Tame mooselings are exhibited.  Sportsmen at Kinneo can choose a matinee with the trout or a soiree with the moose.

The chief fact of a moose’s person is that pair of strange excrescences, his horns.  Like fronds of tree-fern, like great corals or sea-fans, these great palmated plates of bone lift themselves from his head, grand, useless, clumsy.  A pair of moose-horns overlooks me as I write; they weigh twenty pounds, are nearly five feet in spread, on the right horn are nine developed and two undeveloped antlers, the plates are sixteen inches broad,—­a doughty head-piece.

Every year the great, slow-witted animal must renew his head-gear.  He must lose the deformity, his pride, and cultivate another.  In spring, when the first anemone trembles to the vernal breeze, the moose nods welcome to the wind, and as he nods feels something rattle on his skull.  He nods again, as Homer sometimes did.  Lo! something drops.  A horn has dropped, and he stands a bewildered unicorn.  For a few days he steers wild; in this ill-balanced course his lone horn strikes every tree on this side as he dodges from that side.  The unhappy creature is staggered, body and mind.  In what Jericho of the forest can he hide his diminished head?  He flies frantic.  He runs amuck through the woods.  Days pass by in gloom, and then comes despair; another horn falls, and he becomes defenceless; and not till autumn does his brow bear again its full honors.

I make no apology for giving a few lines to the great event of a moose’s life.  He is the hero of those evergreen-woods,—­a hero too little recognized, except by stealthy assassins, meeting him by midnight for massacre.  No one seems to have viewed him in his dramatic character, as a forest-monarch enacting every year the tragi-comedy of decoronation and recoronation.

The Kinneo House is head-quarters for moose-hunters.  This summer the waters of Maine were diluvial, the feeding-grounds were swamped.  Of this we took little note:  we were in chase of something certain not to be drowned; and the higher the deluge, the easier we could float to Katahdin.  After dinner we took the steamboat again for the upper end of the lake.

It was a day of days for sunny summer sailing.  Purple haziness curtained the dark front of Kinneo,—­a delicate haze purpled by this black promontory, but melting blue like a cloud-fall of cloudless sky upon loftier distant summits.  The lake rippled pleasantly, flashing at every ripple.