It is never lonely with Nature. Without
unnatural men or unnatural beasts, she is capital society by herself.
And so we found her,--a lovely being in perfect toilet, which I
describe, in an indiscriminating, masculine way, by saying that it was a
forest and a river and lakes and a mountain and doubtless sky, all made
resplendent by her judicious disposition of a most becoming light.
Iglesias and I, being old friends, were received into close intimacy.
She smiled upon us unaffectedly, and had a thousand exquisite things to
say, drawing us out also, with feminine tact, to say our best things,
and teaching us to be conscious, in her presence, of more delicate
possibilities of refinement and a tenderer poetic sense. So we voyaged
through the sunny hours, and were happy.

Yet there was no monotony in our progress. We could not always drift and
glide. Sometimes we must fight our way. Below the placid reaches were
the inevitable "rips" and rapids: some we could shoot without hitting
anything; some would hit us heavily, did we try to shoot. Whenever
the rocks in the current were only as thick as the plums in a
boarding-school pudding, we could venture to run the gantlet; whenever
they multiplied to a school-boy's ideal, we were arrested. Just at the
brink of peril we would sweep in by an eddy into a shady pool by the
shore. At such spots we found a path across the carry. Cancut at once
proceeded to bonnet himself with the trickling birch. Iglesias and I
took up the packs and hurried on with minds intent on berries. Berries
we always found,--blueberries covered with a cloudy bloom, blueberries
pulpy, saccharine, plenteous.

Often, when a portage was not quite necessary, a dangerous bit of white
water would require the birch to be lightened. Cancut must steer her
alone over the foam, while we, springing ashore, raced through the thick
of the forest, tore through the briers, and plunged through the punk of
trees older than history, now rotting where they fell, slain by Time the
Giganticide. Cancut then had us at advantage. Sometimes we had laughed
at him, when he, a good-humored malaprop, made vague clutches at the
thread of discourse. Now suppose he should take a fancy to drop down
stream and leave us. What then? Berries then, and little else, unless we
had a chance at a trout or a partridge. It is not cheery, but dreary, to
be left in pathlessness, blanketless, guideless, and with breadths of
lake and mountain and Nature, shag