The storm rolled by and gave us a noble view of Katahdin, beyond a broad, beautiful scope of water, and rising seemingly directly from it.  We fled before another squall, over another breadth of Bammydumcook, and made a portage around a great dam below the lake.  The world should know that at this dam the reddest, spiciest, biggest, thickest wintergreen berries in the world are to be found, beautiful as they are good.

Birch had hitherto conducted himself with perfect propriety.  I, the novice, had acquired such entire confidence in his stability of character that I treated him with careless ease, and never listened to the warnings of my comrades that he would serve me a trick.  Cancut navigated Birch through some white water below the dam, and Birch went curveting proudly and gracefully along, evidently feeling his oats.  When Iglesias and I came to embark, I, the novice, perhaps a little intoxicated with wintergreen berries, stepped jauntily into the laden boat.  Birch, alas, failed me.  He tilted; he turned; he took in Penobscot,—­took it in by the quart, by the gallon, by the barrel; he would have sunk without mercy, had not Iglesias and Cancut succeeded in laying hold of a rock and restoring equilibrium.  I could not have believed it of Birch.  I was disappointed, and in consternation; and if I had not known how entirely it was Birch’s fault that everybody was ducked and everybody now had a wet blanket, I should have felt personally foolish.  I punished myself for another’s fault and my own inexperience by assuming the wet blankets as my share at the next carry.  I suppose few of my readers imagine how many pounds of water a blanket can absorb.

After camps at Katahdin, any residence in the woods without a stupendous mountain before the door would have been tame.  It must have been this, and not any wearying of sylvan life, that made us hasten to reach the outermost log-house at the Millinoket carry before nightfall.  The sensation of house and in-door life would be a new one, and so satisfying in itself that we should not demand beautiful objects to meet our first blink of awakening eyes.

An hour before sunset, Cancut steered us toward a beach, and pointed out a vista in the woods, evidently artificial, evidently a road trodden by feet and hoofs, and ruled by parallel wheels.  A road is one of the kindliest gifts of brother man to man:  if a path in the wilderness, it comes forward like a friendly guide offering experience and proposing a comrade dash deeper into the unknown world; if a highway, it is the great, bold, sweeping character with which civilization writes its autograph upon a continent.  Leaving our plunder on the beach, beyond the reach of plunderers, whose great domain we were about to enter, we walked on toward the first house, compelled at parting to believe, that, though we did not love barbarism less, we loved civilization more.  In the morning, Cancut should, with an ox-cart, bring Birch and our traps over the three miles of the carry.