days ridiculously accommodating in letting themselves be pulled up at
the end of a long, thick string with a pound of lead and two hooks tied
to it. There were plenty of places considered proper for picnics, like
Jordan's Pond, and Great Cranberry Island, and the Russian Tea-house,
and the Log Cabin Tea-house, where you would be sure to meet other
people who also were bent on picnicking; and there were hotels and
summer cottages, of various degrees of elaboration, filled with
agreeable and talkable folk, most of whom were connected by occupation
or marriage with the rival colleges and universities, so that their
ambitions for the simple life had an academic thoroughness and
regularity. There were dinner parties, and tea parties, and garden
parties, and sea parties, and luncheon parties, masculine and feminine,
and a horse-show at Bar Harbor, and a gymkhana at North East, and
dances at all the Harbors, where Minerva met Terpischore on a friendly
footing while Socrates sat out on the veranda with Midas discussing the
great automobile question over their cigars.

It was all vastly entertaining and well-ordered, and you would think
that any person with a properly constituted mind ought to be able to
peg through a vacation in such a place without wavering. But when the
boy confessed to me that he felt the need of a few "days off" in the
big woods to keep him up to his duty, I saw at once that the money
spent upon his education had not been wasted; for here, without effort,
he announced a great psychological fact--_that no vacation is perfect
without a holiday in it_. So we packed our camping-kit, made our peace
with the family, tied our engagements together and cut the string below
the knot, and set out to find freedom and a little fishing in the
region around Lake Nicatous.

The south-east corner of the State of Maine is a happy remnant of the
ancient wilderness. The railroads will carry you around it in a day, if
you wish to go that way, making a big oval of two or three hundred
miles along the sea and by the banks of the Penobscot, the
Mattawamkeag, and the St. Croix. But if you wisely wish to cross the
oval you must ride, or go afoot, or take to your canoe; probably you
will have to try all three methods of locomotion, for the country is a
mixed quantity. It reminds me of what I once heard in Stockholm: that
the Creator, when the making of the rest of the world was done, had a
lot of fragments of land and water, fores