HEN Thoreau poled up the West Branch of the Penobscot in 1846

W and climbed beside

Abol Stream and over the timber-line spruce to the table-land of Katahdin (which he spelled, as is now again the fashion, Kaadn), he commented on the fact that while he seemed to be penetrating into ergin wilderness, actually the lumberad been before him and culled out argest pine. A great storage-dam the West Branch at Ripogenus Thoreau would hardly recogcook Lake, so high are its

Yet such is the wonder of

renewal in this forest that almost as in his day you can wander for miles and miles through its trails and tote-roads, or carry your canoe by the rocky footpath around Pockwockamus Falls (if you have the strength and the knack to heave up a canoe on your shoulders), and feel yourself still in the virgin wilderness.

There are two approaches to Katahdin, the superiority of either depending on what you are after. If you seek the immediate sight of its sternest aspect and a try at its most difficult line of ascent, you will go in from the east, coming at once into the Great Basin, a mile in diameter, ringed on three sides by 2,000-foot walls, and seeing at once the famous chimney (famous, at least, among Yankee moun

din's shoulder and the mile walk over the subarctic table-land, till the precipices of the Great Basin at last burst upon you as a climax at the summit, then approach the mountain from the west; and if you have the time, take three days for the ascent, spending two nights at the cabin by Abol Slide. A night on Katahdin, above the moonlit forest, and the lakes like chains of quicksilver vanishing into mystery, with the mountain bulk behind you climbing upward to the stars, is a night not soon forgotten, though not easily attained.

The fires of autumn were beginning to flare all along the banks of the West

There are innumerable soft maples which turn every shade of red, from vivid scarlet to deep claret, and these colors alternate everywhere with the golds of the rock maples, birches, and lower shrubs, and are intensified by the vivid greens of the young spruces and balsams (sometimes, indeed, the balsams are almost as blue as a Colorado spruce), which push up their shapely spires in every inch of available space, and by the more sombre green of the scattered hemlocks and, now and then, an aged pine, veteran of the forest that has gone, towering fifty feet above all the other trees. The dark, still reaches of the Penobscot, where we glided close

bing down-stream to the mill that would chew it up into paper, whereon to print the silly doings of the world we had left behind.

I insisted on carrying my canoe around Pockwockamus Falls. Perhaps insisted is hardly the word, since my guide offered no convincing opposition. I demonstrated that I could do it, but I also proved conclusively to myself that I possessed two shoulder-blades insufficiently protected by fleshy covering. We passed, on the water, the mouth of Abol Stream, where Thoreau camped for a night before beginning his attack on the then pathless mountain. An old bateau, gray with age,

the shod pole slipped while the canoe quivered and seemed fated to slide back on the rush of the current. A Penobscot boatman "reading water," holding his canoe, up stream or down, free of the rocks and logs, using to his advantage every eddy and backwater, and fighting easily with his two arms and a slender spruce-pole the downrush of a river, is as pretty an illustration of physical co-ordination and applied skill as the sports of man afford. The ring of his iron-shod pole amid the white rapids, and echoed from the walls of the forest, is an added music to the roar of the waterfall.

We left our canoes bottom side up in

there, upon the almost jet-black tarn. The old dam had flooded back enough to kill the trees for some distance around Lilypad, and what remained of them now stood up from the sedges like gray ghosts of a forest. As we slipped noiselessly out upon the molten black enamel, the whole mountain prospect about us, invisible for several miles back because of the forest, burst suddenly on our sight, under the flush and mystery of dying day. To the north rose the sharp cone of Double Top, rippling away in lower summits to the west, and in color an exquisite gun-metal blue. Just east of that was a dusk-filled gorge, and then the steep side of Oji went up, coming southward on our right with

beautiful beyond speech. Yet it found adequate speech as we were making the last half-mile portage beyond Lilypad. A belated whitethroat fluted his song through the twilight, and across the dim trail two barred owls called to each other softly, like the very voice of the forest.

Our final paddle was toward the friendly lights of Hunt's Camp across Kidney Pond, and the welcome whang of the supper-bell came to us over the dark water before our keels beached. That night, as we climbed to bed in the snug log cabins, the loons were laughing out on the lake, and we knew we were camped in the north woods at last. He who does not thrill to the lonely night laughter of