und of
ancient hay, not without the mustiness of its age.

No one clawed us, no one chawed us, that night. A Ripogenus chill awaked
the whole party with early dawn. We sprang from our nests, shook the
hay-seed out of our hair, and were full-dressed without more ceremony,
ready for whatever grand sensation Nature might purvey for our aesthetic
breakfast.

Nothing is ever as we expect. When we stepped into out-of-doors, looking
for Ripogenus, a lake of Maine, we found not a single aquatic fact in
the landscape. Ripogenus, a lake, had mizzled, (as the Americans say,)
literally mizzled. Our simplified view comprised a grassy hill with
barns, and a stern positive pyramid, surely Katahdin; aloft, beyond,
above, below, thither, hither, and yon, Fog, not fog, but FOG.

Ripogenus, the water-body, had had aspirations, and a boon of brief
transfiguration into a cloud-body had been granted it by Nature, who
grants to every terrestrial essence prophetic experiences of what it one
day would be.

In short, and to repeat, Ripogenus had transmuted itself into vapor, and
filled the valley full to our feet. A faint wind had power to billow
this mist-lake, and drive cresting surges up against the eastern
hill-side, over which they sometimes broke, and, involving it totally,
rolled clear and free toward Katahdin, where he stood hiding the glows
of sunrise. Leagues higher up than the mountain rested a presence of
cirri, already white and luminous with full daylight, and from them
drooped linking wreaths of orange mist, clinging to the rosy-violet
granite of the peak.

Up clomb and sailed Ripogenus and befogged the whole; then we
condescended to breakfast.

CHAPTER XI.

TOWARD KATAHDIN.

Singularly enough, mill-dams are always found below mill-ponds.
Analogously in the Maine rivers, below the lakes, rapids are. Rapids
too often compel carries. While we breakfasted without steak of bear
or cutlet of moose, Ripogenus gradually retracted itself, and became
conscious again of what poetry there is in a lake's pause and a 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