make a square vessel, the corners bent around against
the sides and held by a wooden pin. When, one day, we were overtaken
by a shower in traveling through the woods, our guide quickly stripped
large sheets of the bark from a near tree, and we had each a perfect
umbrella as by magic. When the rain was over, and we moved on, I wrapped
mine about me like a large leather apron, and it shielded my clothes
from the wet bushes. When we came to a spring, Uncle Nathan would have
a birch-bark cup ready before any of us could get a tin one out of his
knapsack, and I think water never tasted so sweet as from one of these
bark cups. It is exactly the thing. It just fits the mouth and it seems
to give new virtues to the water. It makes me thirsty now when I think
of it. In our camp at Moxie we made a large birch-bark box to keep the
butter in; and the butter in this box, covered with some leafy boughs,
I think improved in flavor day by day. Maine butter needs something to
mollify and sweeten it a little, and I think birch bark will do it. In
camp Uncle Nathan often drank his tea and coffee from a bark cup; the
china closet in the birch-tree was always handy, and our vulgar tin
ware was generally a good deal mixed, and the kitchen-maid not at all
particular about dish-washing. We all tried the oatmeal with the maple
syrup in one of these dishes, and the stewed mountain cranberries,
using a birch-bark spoon, and never found service better. Uncle Nathan
declared he could boil potatoes in a bark kettle, and I did not doubt
him. Instead of sending our soiled napkins and table-spreads to the
wash, we rolled them up into candles and torches, and drew daily upon
our stores in the forest for new ones.

But the great triumph of the birch is of course the bark canoe. When
Uncle Nathan took us out under his little wood-shed, and showed us, or
rather modestly permitted us to see, his nearly finished canoe, it was
like a first glimpse of some new and unknown genius of the woods or
streams. It sat there on the chips and shavings and fragments of bark
like some shy delicate creature just emerged from its hiding-place, or
like some wild flower just opened. It was the first boat of the kind
I had ever seen, and it filled my eye completely. What woodcraft it
indicated, and what a wild free life, sylvan life, it promised! It had
such a fresh, aboriginal look as I had never before seen in any kind of
handiwork. Its clear yellow-red color would have becom