I am sorry to chronicle that Iglesias hereupon turned to the ox and said impatiently,—­

“Now, then, bullgine!”

Why a railroad, even a wooden one, here?  For this:  the Penobscot at this point approaches within two and a half miles of Moosehead Lake, and over this portage supplies are taken conveniently for the lumbermen of an extensive lumbering country above, along the river.

Corduroy railroad, ox-locomotive, and go-cart train up in the pine woods were a novelty and a privilege.  Our cloven-hoofed engine did not whirr turbulently along, like a thing of wheels.  Slow and sure must the knock-kneed chewer of cuds step from log to log.  Creakingly the wain followed him, pausing and starting and pausing again with groans of inertia.  A very fat ox was this, protesting every moment against his employment, where speed, his duty, and sloth, his nature, kept him bewildered by their rival injunctions.  Whenever the engine-driver stopped to pick a huckleberry, the train, self-braking, stopped also, and the engine took in fuel from the tall grass that grew between the sleepers.  It was the sensation of sloth at its uttermost.

Iglesias and I, meanwhile, marched along and shot the game of the country, namely, one Tetrao Canadensis, one spruce-partridge, making in all one bird, quite too pretty to shoot with its red and black plumage.  The spruce-partridge is rather rare in inhabited Maine, and is malignantly accused of being bitter in flesh, and of feeding on spruce-buds to make itself distasteful.  Our bird we found sweetly berry-fed.  The bitterness, if any, was that we had not a brace.

So, at last, in an hour, after shooting one bird and swallowing six million berries, for the railroad was a shaft into a mine of them, we came to the terminus.  The chewer of cuds was disconnected, and plodded off to his stable.  The go-cart slid down an inclined plane to the river, the Penobscot.

We paid quite freely for our brief monopoly of the railroad to the superintendent, engineer, stoker, poker, switch-tender, brakeman, baggage-master, and every other official in one.  But who would grudge his tribute to the enterprise that opened this narrow vista through toward the Hyperboreans, and planted these once not crumbling sleepers and once not rickety rails, to save the passenger a portage?  Here, at Bullgineville, the pluralist railroad-manager had his cabin and clearing, ox-engine house and warehouse.

To balance these symbols of advance, we found a station of the rear-guard of another army.  An Indian party of two was encamped on the bank.  The fusty sagamore of this pair was lying wounded; his fusty squaw tended him tenderly, minding, meanwhile, a very witch-like caldron of savory fume.  No skirmish, with actual war-whoop and sheen of real scalping-knife, had put this prostrate chieftain here hors du combat.  He had shot himself cruelly by accident.  So he informed us feebly, in a muddy, guttural patois of Canadian French.  This aboriginal meeting was of great value; it helped to eliminate the railroad.