I am sharp-set, for I
do not refuse the blue-pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as
I retrace my steps, in the frosty eve being perhaps four or five miles
from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep
my balance."

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

The traveler and camper-out in Maine, unless he penetrates its more
northern portions, has less reason to remember it as a pine-tree State
than a birch-tree State. The white-pine forests have melted away like
snow in the spring and gone down stream, leaving only patches here and
there in the more remote and inaccessible parts. The portion of the
State I saw--the valley of the Kennebec and the woods about Moxie
Lake--had been shorn of its pine timber more than forty years before,
and is now covered with a thick growth of spruce and cedar and various
deciduous trees. But the birch abounds. Indeed, when the pine goes out
the birch comes in; the race of men succeeds the race of giants.
This tree has great stay-at-home virtues. Let the sombre, aspiring,
mysterious pine go; the birch has humble every-day uses. In Maine, the
paper or canoe birch is turned to more account than any other tree. I
read in Gibbon that the natives of ancient Assyria used to celebrate
in verse or prose the three hundred and sixty uses to which the various
parts and products of the palm-tree were applied. The Maine birch is
turned to so many accounts that it may well be called the palm of this
region. Uncle Nathan, our guide, said it was made especially for the
camper-out; yes, and for the wood-man and frontiersman generally. It is
a magazine, a furnishing store set up in the wilderness, whose goods are
free to every comer. The whole equipment of the camp lies folded in it,
and comes forth at the beck of the woodman's axe; tent, waterproof
roof, boat, camp utensils, buckets, cups, plates, spoons, napkins,
table cloths, paper for letters or your journal, torches, candles,
kindling-wood, and fuel. The canoe-birch yields you its vestments with
the utmost liberality. Ask for its coat, and it gives you its waistcoat
also. Its bark seems wrapped about it layer upon layer, and comes off
with great ease. We saw many rude structures and cabins shingled and
sided with it, and haystacks capped with it. Near a maple-sugar camp
there was a large pile of birch-bark sap-buckets,--each bucket made of
a piece of bark about a yard square, folded up as the tinman folds up
a sheet of tin to