h the morning dew, spread an immense
breakfast-table to tempt us. The most beautiful of all was at the edge
of a fir-wood, with a huge rock, covered with moss and lichen, sloping
down before us in a broad, open descent of thirty feet to the foaming
stream. The full moon climbed into the sky as we sat around our
camp-fire, and showed her face above the dark, pointed tree-tops. The
winding vale was flooded with silver radiance that rested on river and
rock and tree-trunk and multitudinous leafage like an enchantment of
tranquillity. The curling currents and the floating foam, up and down
the stream, were glistening and sparkling, ever moving, yet never
losing their position. The shouting of the water melted to music, in
which a thousand strange and secret voices, near and far away, blending
and alternating from rapid to rapid and fall to fall, seemed like
hidden choirs, answering one another from place to place. The sense of
struggle, of pressure and resistance, of perpetual change, was gone;
and in its stead there was a feeling of infinite quietude, of perfect
balance and repose, of deep accord and amity between the watching
heavens and the waiting earth, in which the conflicts of existence
seemed very distant and of little meaning, and the peace of nature
prophesied

"That one, far-off divine event
Towards which the whole creation moves."

Thus for six days and nights we kept company with our little river,
following its guidance and enjoying all its changing moods. Sometimes
it led us through a smooth country, across natural meadows,
alder-fringed, where the bed of the stream was of amber sand and
polished gravel, and the water rippled gently over the shallow bars,
and there were deep holes underneath the hanging bushes, where the
trout hid from the heat of the noon sun. Sometimes it had carved a way
for itself over huge beds of solid rock, where, if the slope was
gentle, we could dart arrow-like along the channel from pool to pool;
but if the descent was steep and broken, we must get out of the canoes
and let them down with ropes. Sometimes the course ran for miles
through evergreen forests, where the fragrance of the fir-trees filled
the air; and again we came out into the open regions where thousands of
acres of wild blueberries were spread around us.

I call them wild because no man's hand has planted them. Yet they are
cultivated after a fashion. Every two or three years a district of
these hills is set