rail, Damon and I, as if school were out and
would never keep again. How fresh and tonic the forest seemed as we
plunged into its bath of shade. There were our old friends the cedars,
with their roots twisted across the path; and the white birches, so trim
in youth and so shaggy in age; and the sociable spruces and balsams,
crowding close together, and interlacing their arms overhead. There were
the little springs, trickling through the moss; and the slippery logs
laid across the marshy places; and the fallen trees, cut in two and
pushed aside,--for this was a much-travelled portage.

Around the open spaces, the tall meadow-rue stood dressed in robes of
fairy white and green. The blue banners of the fleur-de-lis were planted
beside the springs. In shady corners, deeper in the wood, the fragrant
pyrola lifted its scape of clustering bells, like a lily of the valley
wandered to the forest. When we came to the end of the portage, a
perfume like that of cyclamens in Tyrolean meadows welcomed us, and
searching among the loose grasses by the water-side we found the
exquisite purple spikes of the lesser fringed orchis, loveliest and most
ethereal of all the woodland flowers save one. And what one is that? Ah,
my friend, it is your own particular favourite, the flower, by whatever
name you call it, that you plucked long ago when you were walking in the
forest with your sweetheart,--

"Im wunderschonen Monat Mai
Als alle Knospen sprangen."

We launched our canoes again on the great pool at the foot of the first
fall,--a broad sweep of water a mile long and half a mile wide, full of
eddies and strong currents, and covered with drifting foam. There was
the old campground on the point, where I had tented so often with my
lady Greygown, fishing for ouananiche, the famous land-locked salmon of
Lake St. John. And there were the big fish, showing their back fins as
they circled lazily around in the eddies, as if they were waiting to
play with us. But the goal of our day's journey was miles away, and we
swept along with the stream, now through a rush of quick water, boiling
and foaming, now through a still place like a lake, now through

"Fairy crowds
Of islands, that together lie,
As quietly as spots of sky
Among the evening clouds."

The beauty of the shores was infinitely varied, and unspoiled by
any sign of the presence of man. We met no company except a few
king-fishers, and