lse has that definite indefiniteness, that melting
permanence, that evanescing changelessness. Clouds in vain strive to
imitate it; they are made of slighter stuff; they can be blunt or
ragged, but they cannot have that solid positiveness.

Mountains, too, are very stationary,--always at their post. They are
characters of dignity, not without noble changes of mood; but these
changes are not bewildering, capricious shifts. A mountain can be
studied like a picture; its majesty, its grace can be got by heart.
Purple precipice, blue pyramid, cone or dome of snow, it is a simple
image and a positive thought. It is a delicate fact, first, of
beauty,--then, as you approach, a strong fact of majesty and power.
But even in its cloudy, distant fairness there is a concise, emphatic
reality altogether uncloudlike.

Manly men need the wilderness and the mountain. Katahdin is the best
mountain in the wildest wild to be had on this side the continent. He
looked at us encouragingly over the hills. I saw that he was all that
Iglesias, connoisseur of mountains, had promised, and was content to
wait for the day of meeting.

The steamboat dumped us and our canoe on a wharf at the lake-head about
four o'clock. A wharf promised a settlement, which, however, did not
exist. There was population,--one man and one great ox. Following the
inland-pointing nose of the ox, we saw, penetrating the forest, a wooden
railroad. Ox-locomotive, and no other, befitted such rails. The train
was one great go-cart. We packed our traps upon it, roofed them with our
birch, and, without much ceremony of whistling, moved on. As we started,
so did the steamboat. The link between us and the inhabited world grew
more and more attenuated. Finally it snapped, and we were in the actual
wilderness.

I am sorry to chronicle that Iglesias hereupon turned to the ox and said
impatiently,--

"Now, then, bullgine!"

Why a railroad, even a wooden one, here? For this: the Penobscot at this
point approaches within two and a half miles of Moosehead Lake, and over
this portage supplies are taken conveniently for the lumbermen of an
extensive lumbering country above, along the river.

Corduroy railroad, ox-locomotive, and go-cart train up in the pine woods
were a novelty and a privilege. Our cloven-hoofed engine did not whirr
turbulently along, like a thing of wheels. Slow and sure must the
knock-kneed chewer of cuds step from log to log. Creakingly the wain
followed him, p