n enough to kill a moose stands rather in Nowhere with Boston
fashion. The tameness of that pleasant little capital makes its belles
ardent for tales of wild adventure. New-York women are less exacting; a
few of them, indeed, like a dash of the adventurous in their lover; but
most of them are business-women, fighting their way out of vulgarity
into style, and romance is an interruption.

Kinneo was an old station of Iglesias's, in those days when he was
probing New England for the picturesque. When the steamer landed, he
acted as cicerone, and pointed out to me the main object of
interest thereabouts, the dinner-table. We dined with lumbermen and
moose-hunters, scufflingly.

The moose is the lion of these regions. Near Greenville, a gigantic pair
of moose-horns marks a fork in the road. Thenceforth moose-facts and
moose-legends become the staple of conversation. Moose-meat, combining
the flavor of beefsteak and the white of turtle, appears on the table.
Moose-horns with full explanations, so that the buyer can play the part
of hunter, are for sale. Tame mooselings are exhibited. Sportsmen at
Kinneo can choose a _matinee_ with the trout or a _soiree_ with the
moose.

The chief fact of a moose's person is that pair of strange excrescences,
his horns. Like fronds of tree-fern, like great corals or sea-fans,
these great palmated plates of bone lift themselves from his head,
grand, useless, clumsy. A pair of moose-horns overlooks me as I write;
they weigh twenty pounds, are nearly five feet in spread, on the right
horn are nine developed and two undeveloped antlers, the plates are
sixteen inches broad,--a doughty head-piece.

Every year the great, slow-witted animal must renew his head-gear. He
must lose the deformity, his pride, and cultivate another. In spring,
when the first anemone trembles to the vernal breeze, the moose nods
welcome to the wind, and as he nods feels something rattle on his skull.
He nods again, as Homer sometimes did. Lo! something drops. A horn has
dropped, and he stands a bewildered unicorn. For a few days he steers
wild; in this ill-balanced course his lone horn strikes every tree
on this side as he dodges from that side. The unhappy creature is
staggered, body and mind. In what Jericho of the forest can he hide his
diminished head? He flies frantic. He runs amuck through the woods. Days
pass by in gloom, and then comes despair; another horn falls, and he
becomes defenceless; and not till autumn