vily, might seek the safe shallows, away from the
dangerous bursts of mid-current, and choose passages where Cancut, with
the setting-pole, could let it gently down. So Iglesias and I plunged
through the labyrinthine woods, the stream along.

Not long after our little episode of buffeting, we shot out again upon
smooth water, and soon, for it is never smooth but it is smoothest, upon
a lake, Chesuncook.

CHAPTER IX.

CHESUNCOOK.

Chesuncook is a "bulge" of the Penobscot: so much for its topography. It
is deep in the woods, except that some miles from its opening there is
a lumbering-station, with house and barns. In the wilderness, man makes
for man by a necessity of human instinct. We made for the log-houses.
We found there an ex-barkeeper of a certain well-known New-York cockney
coffee-house, promoted into a frontiersman, but mindful still of
flesh-pots. Poor fellow, he was still prouder that he had once tossed
the foaming cocktail than that he could now fell the forest-monarch.
Mixed drinks were dearer to him than pure air. When we entered the long,
low log-cabin, he was boiling doughnuts, as was to be expected. In
certain regions of America every cook who is not baking pork and beans
is boiling doughnuts, just as in certain other gastronomic quarters
_frijoles_ alternate with _tortillas_.

Doughnuts, like peaches, must be eaten with the dew upon them. Caught as
they come bobbing up in the bubbling pot, I will not say that they are
despicable. Woodsmen and canoemen, competent to pork and beans, can
master also the alternative. The ex-barkeeper was generous with these
brown and glistening langrage-shot, and aimed volley after volley at our
mouths. Nor was he content with giving us our personal fill; into every
crevice of our firkin he packed a pellet of future indigestion. Besides
this result of foraging, we took the hint from a visible cow that milk
might be had. Of this also the ex-barkeeper served us out galore,
sighing that it was not the punch of his metropolitan days. We put our
milk in our tea-pot, and thus, with all the ravages of the past made
good, we launched again upon Chesuncook.

Chesuncook, according to its quality of lake, had no aid to give us with
current. Paddling all a hot August mid-day over slothful water would
be tame, day-laborer's work. But there was a breeze. Good! Come, kind
Zephyr, fill our red blanket-sail! Cancut's blanket in the bow became a
substitute for Cancut's paddle in t