running the gantlet of whirlpools and breakers may do, except the fatal finality of a somerset.  That we escaped, and only escaped.  We had been only reckless, not audacious; and therefore peril, not punishment, befell us.  The rocks smote our frail shallop; they did not crush it.  Foam and spray dashed in our faces; solid fluid below the crest did not overwhelm us.  There we were, presently, in water tumultuous, but not frantic.  There we were, three men floating in a birch, not floundering in a maelstrom,—­on the water, not under it,—­sprinkled, not drowned,—­and in a wild wonder how we got into it and how we got out of it.

Cancut’s paddle guided us through.  Unwieldy he may have been in person, but he could wield his weapon well.  And so, by luck and skill, we were not drowned in the magnificent uproar of the rapid.  Success, that strange stirabout of Providence, accident, and courage, were ours.  But when we came to the next cascading bit, though the mist had now lifted, we lightened the canoe by two men’s avoir-dupois, that it might dance, and not blunder heavily, might seek the safe shallows, away from the dangerous bursts of mid-current, and choose passages where Cancut, with the setting-pole, could let it gently down.  So Iglesias and I plunged through the labyrinthine woods, the stream along.

Not long after our little episode of buffeting, we shot out again upon smooth water, and soon, for it is never smooth but it is smoothest, upon a lake, Chesuncook.

CHAPTER IX.

CHESUNCOOK.

Chesuncook is a “bulge” of the Penobscot:  so much for its topography.  It is deep in the woods, except that some miles from its opening there is a lumbering-station, with house and barns.  In the wilderness, man makes for man by a necessity of human instinct.  We made for the log-houses.  We found there an ex-barkeeper of a certain well-known New-York cockney coffee-house, promoted into a frontiersman, but mindful still of flesh-pots.  Poor fellow, he was still prouder that he had once tossed the foaming cocktail than that he could now fell the forest-monarch.  Mixed drinks were dearer to him than pure air.  When we entered the long, low log-cabin, he was boiling doughnuts, as was to be expected.  In certain regions of America every cook who is not baking pork and beans is boiling doughnuts, just as in certain other gastronomic quarters frijoles alternate with tortillas.

Doughnuts, like peaches, must be eaten with the dew upon them.  Caught as they come bobbing up in the bubbling pot, I will not say that they are despicable.  Woodsmen and canoemen, competent to pork and beans, can master also the alternative.  The ex-barkeeper was generous with these brown and glistening langrage-shot, and aimed volley after volley at our mouths.  Nor was he content with giving us our personal fill; into every crevice of our firkin he packed a pellet of future indigestion.  Besides this result of foraging, we took the hint from a visible cow that milk might be had.  Of this also the ex-barkeeper served us out galore, sighing that it was not the punch of his metropolitan days.  We put our milk in our tea-pot, and thus, with all the ravages of the past made good, we launched again upon Chesuncook.