ear, so near the house that they heard all his
guns. His name may have been Hercules, for aught I know, though I should
rather have expected to hear the rattling of his club; but, no doubt, he
keeps pace with the improvements of the age, and uses a Sharpe's rifle
now; probably he gets all his armor made and repaired at Smith's shop. One
moose had been killed and another shot at within sight of the house within
two years. I do not know whether Smith has yet got a poet to look after
the cattle, which, on account of the early breaking up of the ice, are
compelled to summer in the woods, but I would suggest this office to such
of my acquaintances as love to write verses and go a-gunning.

After a dinner, at which apple-sauce was the greatest luxury to me, but
our moose-meat was oftenest called for by the lumberers, I walked across
the clearing into the forest, southward, returning along the shore. For my
dessert, I helped myself to a large slice of the Chesuncook woods, and
took a hearty draught of its waters with all my senses. The woods were as
fresh and full of vegetable life as a lichen in wet weather, and contained
many interesting plants; but unless they are of white pine, they are
treated with as little respect here as a mildew, and in the other case
they are only the more quickly cut down. The shore was of coarse, flat,
slate rocks, often in slabs, with the surf beating on it. The rocks and
bleached drift-logs, extending some way into the shaggy woods, showed a
rise and fall of six or eight feet, caused partly by the dam at the
outlet. They said that in winter the snow was three feet deep on a level
here, and sometimes four or five,--that the ice on the lake was two feet
thick, clear, and four feet, including the snow-ice. Ice had already
formed in vessels.

We lodged here this Sunday night in a comfortable bed-room, apparently the
best one; and all that I noticed unusual in the night--for I still kept
taking notes, like a spy in the camp--was the creaking of the thin split
boards, when any of our neighbors stirred.

Such were the first rude beginnings of a town. They spoke of the
practicability of a winter-road to the Moosehead carry, which would not
cost much, and would connect them with steam and staging and all the busy
world. I almost doubted if the lake would be there,--the self-same lake,--
preserve its form and identity, when the shores should be cleared and
settled; as if these lakes and streams which expl