The busy, keen, short strokes of the axe resounded through the forest.  When these had done their work, and the bungler paused amid his wasteful debris to watch his toil’s result, first was heard a rustle of leaves, as if a passing whirlwind had alighted there; next came the crack of bursting sinews; then the groan of a great riving spasm, and the tree, decapitated at its foot, crashed to earth, with a vain attempt to clutch for support at the stiff, unpitying arms of its woodland brotherhood.

Down was the tree,—­fallen, but so it should not lie.  This tree we proposed to promote from brute matter, mere lumber, downcast and dejected, into finer essence:  fuel was to be made into fire.

First, however, the fuel must be put into portable shape.  We top-sawyers went at our prostrate and vanquished non-resistant, and without mercy mangled and dismembered him, until he was merely a bare trunk, a torso incapable of restoration.

While we were thus busy, useful, and happy, the dripping rain, like a clepsydra, told off the morning moments.  The dinner-hour drew nigh.  We had determined on a feast, and trout were to be its daintiest dainty.  But before we cooked our trout, we must, according to sage Kitchener’s advice, catch our trout.  They were, we felt confident, awaiting us in the refrigerate larder at hand.  We waited until the confusing pepper of a shower had passed away and left the water calm.  Then softly and deftly we propelled our bark across to the Ayboljockameegus.  We tossed to the fish humbugs of wool, silk, and feathers, gauds such as captivate the greedy or the guileless.  Again the “gobemouches” trout, the fellows on the look-out for novelty, dashed up and swallowed disappointing juiceless morsels, and with them swallowed hooks.

We caught an apostolic boat-load of beauties fresh and blooming as Aurora, silver as the morning star, gemmy with eye-spots as a tiger-lily.

O feast most festal!  Iglesias, of course, was the great artist who devised and mainly executed it.  As well as he could, he covered his pot and pan from the rain, admitting only enough to season each dish with gravy direct from the skies.  As day had ripened, the banquet grew ripe.  Then as day declined, we reclined on our triclinium of hemlock and spruce boughs, and made high festival, toasting each other in the uninebriating flow of our beverages.  Jollity reigned.  Cancut fattened, and visibly broadened.  Toward the veriest end of the banquet, we seemed to feel that there had been a slight sameness in its courses.  The Bill of Fare, however, proved the freest variety.  And at the close we sat and sipped our chocolate with uttermost content.  No garcon, cringing, but firm, would here intrude with the unhandsome bill.  Nothing to pay is the rarest of pleasures.  This dinner we had caught ourselves, we had cooked ourselves, and had eaten for the benefit of ourselves and no other.  There was nothing to repent of afterwards in the way of extravagance, and certainly nothing of indigestion.  Indigestion in the forest primeval, in the shadow of Katahdin, is impossible.