is an admirable, lovable, and comfortable
tree, beautiful to look upon and full of various uses. Its wood is
strong to make paddles and axe handles, and glorious to burn, blazing up
at first with a flashing flame, and then holding the fire in its glowing
heart all through the night. Its bark is the most serviceable of all the
products of the wilderness. In Russia, they say, it is used in tanning,
and gives its subtle, sacerdotal fragrance to Russia leather. But here,
in the woods, it serves more primitive ends. It can be peeled off in a
huge roll from some giant tree and fashioned into a swift canoe to carry
man over the waters. It can be cut into square sheets to roof his
shanty in the forest. It is the paper on which he writes his woodland
despatches, and the flexible material which he bends into drinking-cups
of silver lined with gold. A thin strip of it wrapped around the end of
a candle and fastened in a cleft stick makes a practicable chandelier.
A basket for berries, a horn to call the lovelorn moose through the
autumnal woods, a canvas on which to draw the outline of great and
memorable fish--all these and many other indispensable luxuries are
stored up for the skilful woodsman in the birch bark.

Only do not rob or mar the tree, unless you really need what it has
to give you. Let it stand and grow in virgin majesty, ungirdled and
unscarred, while the trunk becomes a firm pillar of the forest temple,
and the branches spread abroad a refuge of bright green leaves for the
birds of the air. Nature never made a more excellent piece of handiwork.
"And if," said my lady Greygown, "I should ever become a dryad, I would
choose to be transformed into a white-birch. And then, when the days of
my life were numbered, and the sap had ceased to flow, and the last
leaf had fallen, and the dry bark hung around me in ragged curls and
streamers, some wandering hunter would come in the wintry night and
touch a lighted coal to my body, and my spirit would flash up in a fiery
chariot into the sky."

The chief occupation of our idle days on the Grande Decharge was
fishing. Above the camp spread a noble pool, more than two miles in
circumference, and diversified with smooth bays and whirling eddies,
sand beaches and rocky islands. The river poured into it at the head,
foaming and raging down a long chute, and swept out of it just in front
of our camp in a merry, musical rapid. It was full of fish of various
kinds--long-nosed pickerel