The rain prevented our continuing any longer in the woods; so giving
some of our provisions and utensils to the Indians, we took leave of
them. This being the steamer's day, I set out for the lake at once. At
the carry-man's camp I saw many little birds, brownish and yellowish,
with some white tail-feathers, hopping on the wood-pile, in company
with the slate-colored snow-bird, (_Fringilla hiemalis_,) but
more familiar than they. The lumberers said that they came round their
camps, and they gave them a vulgar name. Their simple and lively note,
which was heard in all the woods, was very familiar to me, though I
had never before chanced to see the bird while uttering it, and it
interested me not a little, because I had had many a vain chase in a
spring-morning in the direction of that sound, in order to identify
the bird. On the 28th of the next month, (October,) I saw in my yard,
in a drizzling day, many of the same kind of birds flitting about amid
the weeds, and uttering a faint _chip_ merely. There was one
full-plumaged Yellow-crowned Warbler (_Sylvia coronata_) among
them, and I saw that the others were the young birds of that
season. They had followed me from Moosehead and the North. I have
since frequently seen the full-plumaged ones while uttering that note
in the spring.

I walked over the carry alone and waited at the head of the lake. An
eagle, or some other large bird, flew screaming away from its perch by
the shore at my approach. For an hour after I reached the shore there
was not a human being to be seen, and I had all that wide prospect to
myself. I thought that I heard the sound of the steamer before she
came in sight on the open lake. I noticed at the landing, when the
steamer came in, one of our bedfellows, who had been a-moose-hunting
the night before, now very sprucely dressed in a clean white shirt and
fine black pants, a true Indian dandy, who had evidently come over the
carry to show himself to any arrivers on the north shore of Moosehead
Lake, just as New York dandies take a turn up Broadway and stand on
the steps of a hotel.

Midway the lake we took on board two manly-looking middle-aged men,
with their _bateau_, who had been exploring for six weeks as far
as the Canada line, and had let their beards grow. They had the skin
of a beaver, which they had recently caught, stretched on an oval
hoop, though the fur was not good at that season. I talked with one of
them, telling him that I had come a