Cancut’s camp-fire now began to overpower the faint glimmers of twilight.  The single-minded Cancut, little distracted by emotions, had heaped together logs enough to heat any mansion for a winter.  The warmth was welcome, and the great flame, with its bright looks of familiar comradery, and its talk like the complex murmur of a throng, made a fourth in our party by no means terrible, as some other incorporeal visitors might have been.  Fire was not only a talker, but an important actor:  Fire cooked for us our evening chocolate; Fire held the candlestick, while we, without much ceremony of undressing, disposed ourselves upon our spruce-twig couch; and Fire watched over our slumbers, crouching now as if some stealthy step were approaching, now lifting up its head and peering across the river into some recess where the water gleamed and rustled under dark shadows, and now sending far and wide over the stream and the clearing and into every cleft of the forest a penetrating illumination, a blaze of light, death to all treacherous ambush.  So Fire watched while we slept, and when safety came with the earliest gray of morning, it, too, covered itself with ashes and slept.

CHAPTER XIV.

HOMEWARD.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful is dawn in the woods.  Sweet the first opalescent stir, as if the vanguard sunbeams shivered as they dashed along the chilly reaches of night.  And the growth of day, through violet and rose and all its golden glow of promise, is tender and tenderly strong, as the deepening passions of dawning love.  Presently up comes the sun very peremptory, and says to people, “Go about your business!  Laggards not allowed in Maine!  Nothing here to repent of, while you lie in bed and curse to-day because it cannot shake off the burden of yesterday; all clear the past here; all serene the future; into it at once!”

Birch was ready for us.  Objects we travel on, if horses, often stampede or are stampeded; if wagons, they break down; if shanks, they stiffen; if feet, they chafe.  No such trouble befalls Birch; leak, however, it will, as ours did this morning.  We gently beguiled it into the position taken tearfully by unwhipped little boys, when they are about to receive birch.  Then, with a firebrand, the pitch of the seams was easily persuaded to melt and spread a little over the leaky spot, and Birch was sound as a drum.

Staunch and sound Birch needed to be, for presently Penobscot, always a skittish young racer, began to grow lively after he had shaken off the weighty shadow of Katahdin, and, kicking up his heels, went galloping down hill, so furiously that we were at last, after sundry frantic plunges, compelled to get off his back before worse befell us.  In the balmy morning we made our first portage through a wood of spruces.  How light our firkin was growing! its pork, its hard-tack, and its condiments were diffused among us three, and