“Yet some call American life dull.”

“Ay, to dullards!” ejaculated Iglesias.

Moose were said to haunt these regions.  Toward midnight our would-be moose-hunter paddled about up and down, seeking them and finding not.  The waters were too high.  Lily-pads were drowned.  There were no moose looming duskily in the shallows, to be done to death at their banquet.  They were up in the pathless woods, browsing on leaves and deappetizing with bitter bark.  Starlight paddling over reflected stars was enchanting, but somniferous.  We gave up our vain quest and glided softly home,—­already we called it home,—­toward the faint embers of our fire.  Then all slept, as only wood-men sleep, save when for moments Cancut’s trumpet-tones sounded alarums, and we others awoke to punch and batter the snorer into silence.

In due time, bird and cricket whistled and chirped the reveille.  We sprang from our lair.  We dipped in the river and let its gentle friction polish us more luxuriously than ever did any hair-gloved polisher of an Oriental bath.  Our joints crackled for themselves as we beat the current.  From bath like this comes no unmanly kief, no sensuous, slumberous, dreamy indifference, but a nervous, intent, keen, joyous activity.  A day of deeds is before us, and we would be doing.

When we issue from the Penobscot, from our baptism into a new life, we need no valet for elaborate toilet.  Attire is simple, when the woods are the tiring-room.

When we had taken off the water and put on our clothes, we simultaneously thought of breakfast.  Like a circle of wolves around the bones of a banquet, the embers of our fire were watching each other over the ashes; we had but to knock their heads together and fiery fighting began.  The skirmish of the brands boiled our coffee and fried our pork, and we embarked and shoved off.  A thin blue smoke, floating upward, for an hour or two, marked our bivouac; soon this had gone out, and the banks and braes of Ragmuff were lonely as if never a biped had trodden them.  Nature drops back to solitude as easily as man to peace;—­how little this fair globe would miss mankind!

The Penobscot was all asteam with morning mist.  It was blinding the sun with a matinal oblation of incense.  A crew of the profane should not interfere with such act of worship.  Sacrilege is perilous, whoever be the God.  We were instantly punished for irreverence.  The first “rips” came up-stream under cover of the mist, and took us by surprise.  As we were paddling along gently, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a boiling rapid.  Gnashing rocks, with cruel foam upon their lips, sprang out of the obscure, eager to tear us.  Great jaws of ugly blackness snapped about us as if we were introduced into a coterie of crocodiles.  Symplegades clanged together behind; mighty gulfs, below seducing bends of smooth water, awaited us before.  We were in for it.  We spun, whizzed, dashed, leaped, “cavorted;” we did whatever a birch