I may say that Aaron and I kept a tight rein and a good pace till we struck a water-course on the other side, and that we clattered down it with no want of decision till it emptied into a larger stream which we knew must be the East Branch.  An abandoned fishpole lay on the stones, marking the farthest point reached by some fisherman.  According to our reckoning, we were five or six miles above the settlement, with a good depth of primitive woods all about us.

We kept on down the stream, now and then pausing at a likely place to take some trout for dinner, and with an eye out for a good camping-ground.  Many of the trout were full of ripe spawn, and a few had spawned, the season with them being a little later than on the stream we had left, perhaps because the water was less cold.  Neither had the creek here any such eventful and startling career.  It led, indeed, quite a humdrum sort of life under the roots and fallen treetops and among the loose stones.  At rare intervals it beamed upon us from some still reach or dark cover, and won from us our best attention in return.

The day was quite spent before we had pitched our air-woven tent and prepared our dinner, and we gathered boughs for our bed in the gloaming.  Breakfast had to be caught in the morning and was not served early, so that it was nine o’clock before we were in motion.  A little bird, the red-eyed vireo, warbled most cheerily in the trees above our camp, and, as Aaron said, “gave us a good send-off.”  We kept down the stream, following the inevitable bark road.

My companion had refused to look at another “dividing ridge” that had neither path nor way, and henceforth I must keep to the open road or travel alone.  Two hours’ tramp brought us to an old clearing with some rude, tumble-down log buildings that many years before had been occupied by the bark and lumber men.  The prospect for trout was so good in the stream hereabouts, and the scene so peaceful and inviting, shone upon by the dreamy August sun, that we concluded to tarry here until the next day.  It was a page of pioneer history opened to quite unexpectedly.  A dim footpath led us a few yards to a superb spring, in which a trout from the near creek had taken up his abode.  We took possession of what had been a shingle-shop, attracted by its huge fireplace.  We floored it with balsam boughs, hung its walls with our “traps,” and sent the smoke curling again from its disused chimney.

The most musical and startling sound we heard in the woods greeted our ears that evening about sundown as we sat on a log in front of our quarters,—­the sound of slow, measured pounding in the valley below us.  We did not know how near we were to human habitations, and the report of the lumberman’s mallet, like the hammering of a great woodpecker, was music to the ear and news to the mind.  The air was still and dense, and the silence such as alone broods over these little openings in the primitive woods.  My soldier started as if he had heard a signal-gun.  The sound, coming so far through the forest, sweeping over those great wind-harps of trees, became wild and legendary, though probably made by a lumberman driving a wedge or working about his mill.