towards the light. Not one infant tree in a thousand lives to maturity;
yet these survivors form an innumerable host, pressed together in
struggling confusion, squeezed out of symmetry and robbed of normal
development, as men are said to be in the level sameness of democratic
society. Seen from above, their mingled tops spread in a sea of verdure
basking in light; seen from below, all is shadow, through which spots of
timid sunshine steal down among legions of lank, mossy trunks,
toadstools and rank ferns, protruding roots, matted bushes, and rotting
carcasses of fallen trees. A generation ago one might find here and
there the rugged trunk of some great pine lifting its verdant spire
above the undistinguished myriads of the forest. The woods of Maine had
their aristocracy; but the axe of the woodman has laid them low, and
these lords of the wilderness are seen no more.

The life and light of this grim solitude were in its countless streams
and lakes, from little brooks stealing clear and cold under the alders,
full of the small fry of trout, to the mighty arteries of the Penobscot
and the Kennebec; from the great reservoir of Moosehead to a thousand
nameless ponds shining in the hollow places of the forest.

It had and still has its beast of prey,--wolves, savage, cowardly, and
mean; bears, gentle and mild compared to their grisly relatives of the
Far West, vegetarians when they can do no better, and not without
something grotesque and quaint in manners and behavior; sometimes,
though rarely, the strong and sullen wolverine; frequently the lynx; and
now and then the fierce and agile cougar.

The human denizens of this wilderness were no less fierce, and far more
dangerous. These were the various tribes and sub-tribes of the Abenakis,
whose villages were on the Saco, the Kennebec, the Penobscot, and the
other great watercourses. Most of them had been converted by the
Jesuits, and, as we have seen already, some had been persuaded to remove
to Canada, like the converted Iroquois of Caughnawaga.[40] The rest
remained in their native haunts, where, under the direction of their
missionaries, they could be used to keep the English settlements in
check.

We know how busily they plied their tomahawks in William and Mary's War,
and what havoc they made among the scattered settlements of the
border.[41] Another war with France was declared on the fourth of May,
1702, on which the Abenakis again assumed a threatening attitude. I