eks, and his
features were decidedly and refreshingly different from those of any
of the upstart Native American party whom I have seen. He was no
darker than many old white men. He told me that he was eighty-nine;
but he was going a-moose-hunting that fall, as he had been the
previous one. Probably his companions did the hunting. We saw various
squaws dodging about. One sat on the bed by his side and helped him
out with his stories. They were remarkably corpulent, with smooth,
round faces, apparently full of good-humor. Certainly our much-abused
climate had not dried up their adipose substance. While we were
there,--for we stayed a good while,--one went over to Oldtown,
returned and cut out a dress, which she had bought, on another bed in
the room. The Governor said, that "he could remember when the moose
were much larger; that they did not use to be in the woods, but came
out of the water, as all deer did. Moose was whale once. Away down
Merrimack way, a whale came ashore in a shallow bay. Sea went out and
left him, and he came up on land a moose. What made them know he was a
whale was, that at first, before he began to run in bushes, he had no
bowels inside, but"----and then the squaw who sat on the bed by his
side, as the Governor's aid, and had been putting in a word now and
then and confirming the story, asked me what we called that soft thing
we find along the sea-shore. "Jelly-fish," I suggested. "Yes," said
he, "no bowels, but jelly-fish."

There may be some truth in what he said about the moose growing larger
formerly; for the quaint John Josselyn, a physician who spent many
years in this very district of Maine in the seventeenth century, says,
that the tips of their horns "are sometimes found to be two fathoms
asunder,"--and he is particular to tell us that a fathom is six
feet,--"and [they are] in height, from the toe of the forefoot to the
pitch of the shoulder, twelve foot, both which hath been taken by some
of my sceptique readers to be monstrous lies"; and he adds,--"There
are certain transcendentia in every creature, which are the indelible
character of God, and which discover God." This is a greater dilemma
to be caught in than is presented by the cranium of the young Bechuana
ox, apparently another of the _transcendentia_, in the collection
of Thomas Steel, Upper Brook Street, London, whose "entire length of
horn, from tip to tip, along the curve, is 13 ft. 5 in.; distance
(straight) between the tips