on fire, and in the burned ground, the next spring,
the berry-bushes come up innumerable. The following fall they are
loaded so heavily with blueberries that the harvest is gathered with
rakes, each of which has a cup underneath it into which the berries
fall as the rake is thrust through the bushes. The land is owned by two
or three large proprietors, who employ men and women to gather the
crop, paying them a few cents a bushel for picking. Sometimes the
proprietor leases his land to a factor, who pays a royalty on every
bushel turned in at the factory in some village on the railroad or by
the seashore, where the berries are canned or dried.

One day we came upon a camp of these berry-pickers by the river-side.
Our first notice of their proximity was the sight of a raft with an
arm-chair tied in the centre of it, stranded upon the rocks in a long,
fierce rapid. Imagine how this looked to us after we had been five days
in the wilderness! An arm-chair sitting up sedately in the middle of
the rapids! What did it mean? Perhaps some vagrant artist had been
exploring the river, and had fixed his seat there in order to paint a
picture. Perhaps some lazy fisherman had found a good pool amid those
boiling waters, and had arranged to take his ease while he whipped that
fishy place with his flies. The mystery was solved when we rounded the
next point; for there we found the berry-pickers taking their nooning
in a cluster of little slab-shanties. They were friendly folks, men,
women, and children, but they knew nothing about the river; had never
been up farther than the place where the boys had left their raft in
the high water a week ago; had never been down at all; could not tell
how many falls there were below, nor whether the mouth was five or
fifty miles away. They had come in by the road, which crossed the river
at this point, and by the road they would go back when the berries were
picked. They wanted to know whether we were prospecting for lumber or
thinking of going into the berry business. We tried to explain the
nature of our expedition to them, but I reckon we failed.

These were the only people that we really met on our journey, though we
saw a few others far off on some bare hill. We did not encounter a
single boat or canoe on the river. But we saw the deer come down to the
shore, and stand shoulder-deep among the golden-rod and purple asters.
We saw the ruffled grouse whir through the thickets and the wild ducks
s