eft the young bird
sitting upon the water. Then it too disappeared, and when the old one
returned and called, it came out from the shore. On the wing overhead,
the loon looks not unlike a very large duck, but when it alights it
ploughs into the water like a bombshell. It probably cannot take flight
from the land, as the one Gilbert White saw and describes in his letters
was picked up in a field, unable to launch itself into the air.

From Pleasant Pond we went seven miles through the woods to Moxie Lake,
following an overgrown lumberman's "tote" road, our canoe and supplies,
etc., hauled on a sled by the young farmer with his three-year-old
steers. I doubt if birch-bark ever made rougher voyage than that. As I
watched it above the bushes, the sled and the luggage being hidden, it
appeared as if tossed in the wildest and most tempestuous sea. When the
bushes closed above it I felt as if it had gone down, or been broken
into a hundred pieces. Billows of rocks and logs, and chasms of creeks
and spring runs, kept it rearing and pitching in the most frightful
manner. The steers went at a spanking pace; indeed, it was a regular
bovine gale; but their driver clung to their side amid the brush and
boulders with desperate tenacity, and seemed to manage them by signs
and nudges, for he hardly uttered his orders aloud. But we got through
without any serious mishap, passing Mosquito Creek and Mosquito Pond,
and flanking Mosquito Mountain, but seeing no mosquitoes, and brought up
at dusk at a lumberman's old hay-barn, standing in the midst of a lonely
clearing on the shores of Moxie Lake.

Here we passed the night, and were lucky in having a good roof over our
heads, for it rained heavily. After we were rolled in our blankets and
variously disposed upon the haymow, Uncle Nathan lulled us to sleep by a
long and characteristic yarn.

I had asked him, half jocosely, if he believed in "spooks"; but he took
my question seriously, and without answering it directly, proceeded to
tell us what he himself had known and witnessed. It was, by the way,
extremely difficult either to surprise or to steal upon any of Uncle
Nathan's private opinions and beliefs about matters and things. He
was as shy of all debatable subjects as a fox is of a trap. He usually
talked in a circle, just as he hunted moose and caribou, so as not to
approach his point too rudely and suddenly. He would keep on the lee
side of his interlocutor in spite of all one could d