ausing and starting and pausing again with groans of
inertia. A very fat ox was this, protesting every moment against his
employment, where speed, his duty, and sloth, his nature, kept him
bewildered by their rival injunctions. Whenever the engine-driver
stopped to pick a huckleberry, the train, self-braking, stopped also,
and the engine took in fuel from the tall grass that grew between the
sleepers. It was the sensation of sloth at its uttermost.

Iglesias and I, meanwhile, marched along and shot the game of the
country, namely, one _Tetrao Canadensis_, one spruce-partridge, making
in all one bird, quite too pretty to shoot with its red and black
plumage. The spruce-partridge is rather rare in inhabited Maine, and
is malignantly accused of being bitter in flesh, and of feeding on
spruce-buds to make itself distasteful. Our bird we found sweetly
berry-fed. The bitterness, if any, was that we had not a brace.

So, at last, in an hour, after shooting one bird and swallowing six
million berries, for the railroad was a shaft into a mine of them, we
came to the terminus. The chewer of cuds was disconnected, and plodded
off to his stable. The go-cart slid down an inclined plane to the river,
the Penobscot.

We paid quite freely for our brief monopoly of the railroad to the
superintendent, engineer, stoker, poker, switch-tender, brakeman,
baggage-master, and every other official in one. But who would grudge
his tribute to the enterprise that opened this narrow vista through
toward the Hyperboreans, and planted these once not crumbling sleepers
and once not rickety rails, to save the passenger a portage? Here,
at Bullgineville, the pluralist railroad-manager had his cabin and
clearing, ox-engine house and warehouse.

To balance these symbols of advance, we found a station of the
rear-guard of another army. An Indian party of two was encamped on the
bank. The fusty sagamore of this pair was lying wounded; his fusty squaw
tended him tenderly, minding, meanwhile, a very witch-like caldron
of savory fume. No skirmish, with actual war-whoop and sheen of real
scalping-knife, had put this prostrate chieftain here _hors du combat_.
He had shot himself cruelly by accident. So he informed us feebly, in a
muddy, guttural _patois_ of Canadian French. This aboriginal meeting was
of great value; it helped to eliminate the railroad.

CHAPTER VIII.

PENOBSCOT.

It was now five o'clock of an August evening. Our work-day was properl