inted, and in consternation; and if
I had not known how entirely it was Birch's fault that everybody
was ducked and everybody now had a wet blanket, I should have felt
personally foolish. I punished myself for another's fault and my own
inexperience by assuming the wet blankets as my share at the next carry.
I suppose few of my readers imagine how many pounds of water a blanket
can absorb.

After camps at Katahdin, any residence in the woods without a stupendous
mountain before the door would have been tame. It must have been this,
and not any wearying of sylvan life, that made us hasten to reach the
outermost log-house at the Millinoket carry before nightfall. The
sensation of house and in-door life would be a new one, and so
satisfying in itself that we should not demand beautiful objects to meet
our first blink of awakening eyes.

An hour before sunset, Cancut steered us toward a beach, and pointed out
a vista in the woods, evidently artificial, evidently a road trodden
by feet and hoofs, and ruled by parallel wheels. A road is one of the
kindliest gifts of brother man to man: if a path in the wilderness, it
comes forward like a friendly guide offering experience and proposing
a comrade dash deeper into the unknown world; if a highway, it is the
great, bold, sweeping character with which civilization writes its
autograph upon a continent. Leaving our plunder on the beach, beyond
the reach of plunderers, whose great domain we were about to enter, we
walked on toward the first house, compelled at parting to believe, that,
though we did not love barbarism less, we loved civilization more. In
the morning, Cancut should, with an ox-cart, bring Birch and our traps
over the three miles of the carry.

CHAPTER XV.

OUT OF THE WOODS.

What could society do without women and children? Both we found at the
first house, twenty miles from the second. The children buzzed about us;
the mother milked for us one of Maine's vanguard cows. She baked for
us bread, fresh bread,--such bread! not staff of life,--life's
vaulting-pole. She gave us blueberries with cream of cream. Ah, what a
change! We sat on chairs, at a table, and ate from plates. There was a
table-cloth, a salt-cellar made of glass, of glass never seen at
camps near Katahdin. There was a sugar-bowl, a milk-jug, and other
paraphernalia of civilization, including--O memories of Joseph
Bourgogne!--a dome of baked beans, with a crag of pork projecting from
the apex.