rapid’s flow. Fog condensed into water, and water submitting to its destiny went cascading down through a wild defile where no birch could follow.
The Ripogenus carry is three miles long, a faint path through thickets.
“First half,” said Cancut, “’s plain enough; but after that ’t would take a philosopher with his spectacles on to find it.”
This was discouraging. Philosophers twain we might deem ourselves; but what is a craftsman without tools? And never a goggle had we.
But the trappers of muskrats had become our fast friends. They insisted upon lightening our loads over the brambly league. This was kindly. Cancut’s elongated head-piece, the birch, was his share of the burden; and a bag of bread, a firkin of various grub, damp blankets for three, and multitudinous traps, seemed more than two could carry at one trip over this longest and roughest of portages.
We paddled from the camp to the lake-foot, and there, while the others compacted the portables for portage, Iglesias and I, at cost of a ducking with mist-drops from the thickets, scrambled up a crag for a supreme view of the fair lake and the clear mountain. And we did well. Katahdin, from the hill guarding the exit of the Penobscot from Ripogenus, is eminent and emphatic, a signal and solitary pyramid, grander than any below the realms of the unchangeable, more distinctly mountainous than any mountain of those that stop short of the venerable honors of eternal snow.
