a coarse movement would have been death—­wormed our boat off the rock and went fleeting through a labyrinth of new perils, onward with a wild exhilaration, like galloping through prairie on fire.  Of all the high distinctive national pleasures of America, chasing buffalo, stump-speaking, and the like, there is none so intense as shooting rapids in a birch.  Whenever I recall our career down the Penobscot, a longing comes over me to repeat it.

We dropped down stream without further adventures.  We passed the second house, the first village, and other villages, very white and wide-awake, melodiously named Nickertow, Pattagumpus, and Mattascunk.  We spent the first night at Mattawamkeag.  We were again elbowed at a tavern table, and compelled to struggle with real and not ideal pioneers for fried beefsteak and soggy doughboys.  The last river day was tame, but not tiresome.  We paddled stoutly by relays, stopping only once, at the neatest of farm-houses, to lunch on the most airy-substantial bread and baked apples and cream.  It is surprising how confidential a traveller always is on the subject of his gastronomic delights.  He will have the world know how he enjoyed his dinner, perhaps hoping that the world by sympathy will enjoy its own.

Late in the afternoon of our eighth day from Greenville, Moosehead Lake, we reached the end of birch-navigation, the great mill-dams of Indian Oldtown, near Bangor.  Acres of great pine logs, marked three crosses and a dash, were floating here at the boom; we saw what Maine men suppose timber was made for.  According to the view acted upon at Oldtown, Senaglecouna has been for a century or centuries training up its lordly pines, that gang-saws, worked by Penobscot, should shriek through their helpless cylinders, gnashing them into boards and chewing them into sawdust.

Poor Birch! how out of its element it looked, hoisted on a freight-car and travelling by rail to Bangor!  There we said adieu to Birch and Cancut.  Peace and plenteous provender be with him!  Journeys make friends or foes; and we remember our fat guide, not as one who from time to time just did not drown us, but as the jolly comrade of eight days crowded with novelty and beauty, and fine, vigorous, manly life.  END.

* * * * *

A WOMAN.

  Not perfect, nay! but full of tender wants.—­THE PRINCESS

I sat by my window sewing, one bright autumn day, thinking much of twenty other things, and very little of the long seam that slipped away from under my fingers slowly, but steadily, when I heard the front-door open with a quick push, and directly into my open door entered Laura Lane, with a degree of impetus that explained the previous sound in the hall.  She threw herself into a chair before me, flung her hat on the floor, threw her shawl across the window-sill, and looked at me without speaking:  in fact, she was quite too much out of breath to speak.