eegus
trout.

As we drifted along the winding river, between the shimmering birches on
either bank, Katahdin watched us well. Sometimes he would show the point
of his violet gray peak over the woods, and sometimes, at a broad bend
of the water, he revealed himself fully--and threw his great image down
beside for our nearer view. We began to forgive him, to disbelieve in
any personal spite of his, and to recall that he himself, seen thus, was
far more precious than any mappy dulness we could have seen from his
summit. One great upright pyramid like this was worth a continent of
grovelling acres.

Sunset came, and with it we landed at a point below a lake-like stretch
of the river, where the charms of a neighbor and a distant view of the
mountain combined. Cancut the Unwearied roofed with boughs an old frame
for drying moose-hides, while Iglesias sketched, and I worshipped
Katahdin. Has my reader heard enough of it,--a hillock only six thousand
feet high? We are soon to drift away, and owe it here as kindly a
farewell as it gave us in that radiant twilight by the river.

From our point of view we raked the long stern front tending westward.
Just before sunset, from beneath a belt of clouds evanescing over the
summit, an inconceivably tender, brilliant glow of rosy violet mantled
downward, filling all the valley. Then the violet purpled richer and
richer, and darkened slowly to solemn blue, that blended with the gloom
of the pines and shadowy channelled gorges down the steep. The peak
was still in sunlight, and suddenly, half way down, a band of roseate
clouds, twining and changing like a choir of Bacchantes, soared around
the western edge and hung poised above the unillumined forests at the
mountain-base; light as air they came and went and faded away, ghostly,
after their work of momentary beauty was done. One slight maple,
prematurely ripened to crimson and heralding the pomp of autumn,
repeated the bright cloud-color amid the vivid verdure of a little
island, and its image wavering in the water sent the flame floating
nearly to our feet.

Such are the transcendent moments of Nature, unseen and disbelieved by
the untaught. The poetic soul lays hold of every such tender pageant of
beauty and keeps it forever. Iglesias, having an additional method of
preservation, did not fail to pencil rapidly the wondrous scene. When
he had finished his dashing sketch of this glory, so transitory, he
peppered the whole with cabalis