, 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 had passed into muscle.
Lake Degetus, as pretty a pocket lake as there is, followed the carry.
Next came Lake Ambajeejus, larger, but hardly less lovely. Those who
dislike long names may use its shorter Indian title, Umdo. We climbed a
granite crag draped with moss long as the beard of a Druid,--a crag on
the south side of Ambajeejus or Umdo. Thence we saw Katahdin, noble as
ever, unclouded in the sunny morning, near, and yet enchantingly vague,
with the blue sky which surrounded it. It was still an isolate pyramid
rising with no effect from the fair blue lakes and the fair green sea
of the birch-forest,--a brilliant sea of woods, gay as the shallows of
ocean shot through with sunbeams and sunlight reflected upward from
golden sands.

We sped along all that exquisite day, best of all our poetic voyage.
Sometimes we drifted and basked in sunshine, sometimes we lingered in
the birchen shade; we paddled from river to lake, from lake to river
again; the rapids whirled us along, surging and leaping under us with
magnificent gallop; frequent carries struck in, that we might not lose
the forester in the waterman. It was a fresh world that we traversed
on our beautiful river-path,--new as if no other had ever parted its
overhanging bowers.

At noon we floated out upon Lake Pemadumcook, the largest bulge of
the Penobscot, and irregular as the verb To Be. Lumbermen name it
Bammydumcook: Iglesias insisted upon this as the proper reading; and as
he was the responsible man of the party, I accepted it. Woods, woody
hills, and woody mountains surround Bammydumcook. I have no doubt parts
of it are pretty and will be famous in good time; but we saw little. By
the time we were fairly out in the lake and away from the sheltering
shore, a black squall to windward, hiding all the West, warned us to
fly, for birches swamp in squalls. We deemed that Birch, having brought
us through handsomely, deserved a better fate: swamped it must not be.
We plied paddle