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Thanks are due Mr. Bertrand H. Wentworth of Gardiner, Maine, for his very kind permission to illustrate this book with reproductions of his photographs.

ON THE EASTMAN HILL CROSS-ROAD THE WOODS JUT OUT IN ISLANDS ROUND AN OUTCROPPING LEDGE INTERVALE ALONG THE RIVER'S COURSE THE SOUTH WIND IN MARCH THE PEACEFUL, PRETTY HAMLET OF UPPER BRIDGE PLOUGHING MARY'S FIELD ON TRESUMPSCOTT POND THE TRANQUIL WOODS COVER THE RISE AND FALL OF THE RIDGES THE CORN WAS STANDING AMONG THE GOLDEN PUMPKINS IN STACKS THAT LOOKED LIKE HUDDLED WITCHES LONGFELLOW POND LIES IN THE HOLLOW OF THE WOODS ICE-CUTTING ON THE RIVER BEGINS IN JANUARY THE WIND CARVES OUT WAVE-LIKE SHAPES OF DRIFT

A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE

Our county lies in a northern State, in the midst of one of those districts known geographically as "regions of innumerable lakes." It is in good part wooded--hilly, irregular country, not mountainous, but often bold and marked in outline. Save for its lakes, strangers might pass through it without especial notice; but its broken hills have a peculiar intimacy and lovableness, and to us it is so beautiful that new wonder falls on us year after year as we dwell in it.

There is a marked trend of the land. I suppose the first landmark a bird would distinguish in its flight would be our long, round-shouldered ridges, running north and south. Driving across country, either eastward or westward, you go up and up in leisurely rises, with plenty of fairly level resting places between, up long calm shoulder after shoulder, to the Height of Land. And there you take breath of wonder, for lo, before you and below you, behold a whole new countryside framed by new hills.

Sometimes the lower country thus revealed is in its turn broken into lesser hills, or moulded into noble rounding valleys. Sometimes there are stretches of intervale or old lake bottom, of real flat-land, a rare beauty with us, on which the eyes rest with delight. More often than not there is shining water, lake or pond or stream. Sometimes this lower valley country extends for miles before the next range rises, so that your glance travels restfully out over the wide spaces. Sometimes it is little, like a cup.

Last week, before climbing a small bare-peaked mountain, I turned aside to explore a path which led through a field of scattered balsam firs, with lady-fern growing thick about their feet. A little further on, the firs were assembled in groups and clumps, and then group was joined to group. The valley grew deeper and darker, and still the same small path led on, till I found myself in the tallest and most solemn wood of firs that I have ever seen. They were sixty feet high, needle-pointed, black, and they filled the long hollow between the hills, like a dark river.

The woods alternate with fields to clothe the hills and intervales and valleys, and make a constant and lovely variety over the landscape. Sometimes they seem a shore instead of a river. They jut out into the meadowland, in capes and promontories, and stand in little islands, clustered round an outcropping ledge or a boulder too big to be removed. You are confronted everywhere with this meeting of the natural and indented shore of the woods, close, feathery, impenetrable, with the bays and inlets of field and pasture and meadow. The jutting portions are apt to be made more sharp and marked by the most striking part of our growth, the evergreens. There they grow, white pine and red pine, black spruce, hemlock, and balsam fir, in lovely sisterhood. Their needles shine in the sun. They taper perfectly, finished at every point, clean, dry, and resinous; and the fragrance distilled from them by our crystal air is as surely the very breath of New England as that of the Spice Islands is the breath of the East.

The apple orchards are scattered over the slopes. In the more upland places, sheep are kept, and the sheep-pastures are often hillside orchards of tall sugar maples. We have neat fields of oats and barley, more or less scattered, and once in a while a buckwheat patch, while every farm has a good cornfield, beans, pumpkins, and potatoes, besides "the woman's" little patch of "garden truck." A good many bees are kept, in colonies of gray hives under the apple trees.

The people who live on the farms are, I suppose, much like farm people everywhere. "Folks are folks"; yet, after being much with them, certain qualities impress themselves upon one's notice as characteristic; they have a dry sense of humor, and quaint and whimsical ways of expressing it, and with this, a refinement of thought and speech that is almost fastidious; a fine reticence about the physical aspects of life such as is only found, I believe, in a strong race, a people drawing their vigor from deep and untainted springs. I often wonder whether there is another place in the world where women are sheltered from any possible coarseness of expression with such considerate delicacy as they find among the rough men on a New England farm.

The life is so hard, the hours so necessarily long, in our harsh climate, that small-natured persons too often become little more than machines. They get through their work, and they save every penny they can; and that is all. The Granges, however, are increasing a pleasant and wholesome social element which is beyond price, and all winter you meet sleighs full of rosy-cheeked families, driving to the Hall for Grange Meeting, or Sunday Meeting, or for the weekly dance.

Many of the farm people are large-minded enough to do their work well, and still keep above and on top of it; and some of these stand up in a sort of splendor. Their fibres have been seasoned in a life that calls for all a man's powers. Their grave kind faces show that, living all their lives in one place, they have taken the longest of all journeys, and traveled deep into the un-map-able country of Life. I do not know how to write fittingly of some of these older farm people; wise enough to be simple, and deep-rooted as the trees that grow round them; so strong and attuned to their work that the burdens of others grow light in their presence, and life takes on its right and happier proportions when one is with them.

If the first impression of our country is its uniformity, the second and amazing one is its surprises, its secret places. The long ridges accentuate themselves suddenly into sharp slopes and steep cup-shaped valleys, covered with sweet-fern and juniper. The wooded hills are often full of hidden cliffs , and quick brooks run through them, so that you are never long without the talk of one to keep you company. There are rocky glens, where you meet cold, sweet air, the ceaseless comforting of a waterfall, and moss on moss, to velvet depths of green.

The ridges rise and slope and rise again with general likeness, but two of them open amazingly to disclose the wide blue surface of our great River. We are rich in rivers, and never have to journey far to reach one, but I never can get quite used to the surprise of coming among the hills on this broad strong full-running stream, with gulls circling over it.

The greater part of them lie in the unbroken woods, but countless numbers are in open farming country. They run from great sunlit sheets with many islands to the most perfect tiny hidden forest jewels, places utterly lonely and apart, mirroring only the depths of the green woods.

Each "pond," large or little, is a world in itself. You can almost believe that the moon looks down on each with different radiance, that the south wind has a special fragrance as it blows across each; and each one has some peculiar, intimate beauty; deep bays, lovely and secluded channels between wooded islands, or small curved beaches which shine between dark headlands, lit up now and then by a camp fire.

Hill after hill, round-shouldered ridge after ridge; low nearer the salt water, increasing very gradually in height till they form the wild amphitheatre of blue peaks in the northern part of the State; partly farming country, and greater part wooded; this is our countryside, and across it and in and out of the forests its countless lovely lakes shine and its great rivers thread their tranquil way to the sea.

Our river is one of the pair of kingly streams which traverse almost our entire State from north to south. The first twenty-five miles of its course, after leaving the great lake which it drains, is a tearing rapid between rocky walls: then follows perhaps a hundred miles of alternating falls and "dead water," the falls being now fast taken up as water powers. It has eleven hundred feet to fall to reach the sea, and it does most of this in its first thirty miles.

The river's course through part of our county is marked by a noticeable geological formation. For a space of fifteen miles, the greater and lesser tributary streams have broken their way down through the western ridge of the river valley in a succession of small chasms that are so many true mountain defiles in little. They have the sharp descents and extreme variety of slopes and counter-slopes, though with walls never more than a hundred and fifty feet high.

There are forty or fifty of these ravines, some nourishing strong brooks, some a mere trickle, or a stream of green marsh and ferns where water once ran. Acushticook, which threads the largest, is really a river, and Rollingdam, Bombahook, and Worromontogus are all powerful streams. Rollingdam follows a very private course, hidden in deep mossy woods for several miles. The ravine presently deepens and becomes more marked, descending in abrupt slopes, then narrows to a gorge, the rocky sides of which are covered with moss and ferns, nourished by spray. The brook runs through it in two or three short cascades, and falls sheer and white to a pool, twelve feet below.

Below our Town, the river sweeps on, steadily wider and nobler in expanse, till it reaches the place where five other rivers pour their streams into its waters, and it broadens into the sheet of Merrymeeting Bay, three miles from shore to shore.

Below the bay the channel narrows almost to a gorge. The sides are steep and rocky, crowned with black growth of fir and spruce, and through this space the swollen waters pour in great force. There are strong tide races, in which the river steamers reel and tremble, and below this there begins a perfect labyrinth of channels, some mere backwaters, some leading through intricate passages among a hundred fairy islands. There are cliffs, moss and fern-grown, and countless dark headlands. The islands are heavily wooded with characteristic evergreen growth, dense, fragrant, of a rich color, and they are ringed with cream-white granite above the sea-weed, where the blue water circles them.--And so down, till the first break of blue sea shows between the spruces.

We never feel cut off, or too far inland, having our river. The actual sea fog reaches us on a south wind, salt to the lips. Gulls come up all the way from the sea, and save for the winter months, there is hardly a day when you do not see four or five of them wheeling and circling; while twice or thrice in a lifetime a gale brings us Mother Carey's chickens, scudding low, or else worn out and resting after the storm.

The river sleeps all winter under its white covering, but great cracks go ringing and resounding up stream as the tide makes or ebbs, leaping half a mile to a note, to tell of the life that is pulsing beneath; and before the snow comes, you can watch, through the black ice, the drift stuff move quietly beneath your feet with the tide as you skate. I have read fine print through two feet of ice, from a bit of newspaper carried along below by the current. One winter a dovekie lived for three weeks by a small open space made by the eddy near some ledges; then a hard freeze came, and the poor thing broke its neck, diving at the round black space of ice which looked scarcely different from the same space of open water.

The river lies frozen for at least four months. The ice weakens with the March thaws and rains. Then comes a night in April when the forces which move the mountains are at work, and in the morning, lo, the chains are broken. The great stream runs swift and brown and the ice cakes crowd and jostle each other as they spin past.

The river traffic goes steadily on through our three open seasons, and with it a little of the longer perspective of all sea-faring life comes to us, and off-sets the day-in-day-out of the town's shop and factory routine.

Our coal comes in the usual long ugly barges. One or two small excursion steamers connect us with the nearer coast towns, forty miles distant, and every day all summer, the one large passenger steamer which connects us with the big coast cities, comes to or from our town. She takes her tranquil way between the river hills, not without majesty, while the water draws back from the shores as she passes and the high banks reverberate to the peaceful thunder of her paddles. Like other river towns, we have now a fleet of motor boats, in use for pleasure and small fishing.

Traffic on the river shrank immensely with the forming of the Ice Trust, which holds our ice-fields now only as a reserve. We see three or four tall schooners at a time now, where we used to count the riding lights of a dozen at anchor in the channel.

Before the days of tugs, schooners and larger vessels sailed up and down the thirty-odd navigable miles of our river under their own canvas, and the traffic to and from Atlantic ports was carried on by packets: brigs, schooners, and topsail schooners. One of the captains has told me that, seventy-five years ago, on his first voyage, it took his brig seven days to beat to the mouth of the river, a passage now made in six hours. It must have been extremely difficult piloting. The channel is narrow in many places, though the river itself is so wide. There are sand-bars, mud-flats, and ledges.

In my Father's childhood a curious, indeed a unique type of vessel, known as a Waterville Sloop, plied between what was then , the head of navigation, twenty-six miles above us, and Boston, taking lumber and hay. They carried one square-rigged mast, and sailed with lee-boards, like the Dutch galliots, and were in fact a survival of the square-rigged sloops of old time, immortal in the memories of the glorious Sloops of War, and in Turner's pictures.

Scows are rarer than they used to be, but they still carry on their humble, casual lumber and hay business, sailing up with the flood-tide, and tying up for the ebb. They are sloop-rigged, quite smart-looking under sail, and sail with lee-boards, like the Waterville Sloops.

The Lobster Smack, a tiny two-masted schooner, not more than thirty feet long, comes once a week in the season, and we buy our lobsters on the wharf and carry them home all sprawling, and are delighted when we get a little sea-weed with them.

One day what should come up the river but a white schooner, tapering and tall, and glistening with new masts and cordage, bearing a fairy cargo of shells and corals. The rare shells, some of them costly museum pieces, were to be sold to collectors, if any were to be found along our northern harbors, while others, as beautiful as flowers or sunset clouds, the children might have for a few pennies.

The Captain was a young Spaniard, very dark, and as handsome, grave, and simple in bearing, as a Spanish Captain should be. His men seemed to adore him, and to obey the turn of his eyelashes. They all gave us a charming welcome, especially to the children. It was a leisurely and pleasant little venture. I do not know whether it brought in profit, but all the town flocked to the schooner, day after day, for the week that she stayed with us.

The bulwarks and outside fittings, anchors, hawsers, and hawse-holes, seemed wonderfully large to our landsman eyes, and the inside fittings, lockers, etc., as wonderfully small and compact. The enormous masts were of new yellow Oregon pine.

The Captain welcomed us hospitably, and took us down into his cabin, which was fitted with shelves, lockers, and cupboards, neat and compact, all brand-new and shining with varnish. There was a shelf of books, the table had a red cover and reading lamp, and the wife's work-basket stood on it, with some mending. She had gone "upstreet" for her marketing.

"Oh," said one of us, "it looks so homelike and cozy!"

The Captain looked round it complacently, but with remembering eyes that spoke of many things. He had been cruising all winter.

"It looks so to you," he said, "but often it ain't."

The river-bank boys pick up, as easily as they breathe, knowledge as miscellaneous as the drift piled on the shores. They know all the shoals and principal eddies, without the aid of buoys. They know the ways and seasons of the different fish. They learn to recognize the owner's marks on the logs, and they know the times and ways of all the humbler as well as the larger river craft, the scows and smacks, and the "gundalows" which spend mysterious month after month hauled up among the sedges at the mouths of the streams. Their own row-boats are heavy, square at both ends, and clumsy to row, but as I have said, they are out in them in the spring before the floating ice is out of the river, rescuing logs and fragments of lumber from between the ice-cakes.

There is a good deal to the business of picking up logs. The price for returning "strays" to the right owners is ten cents a log , and a good many can be towed at once by a small boat. The price per log rises to twenty-five cents, near the sea. In times of high freshet, the up-river booms often break, and then there is a tremendous to-do at the mouth of the river: men, women, and children, all who can handle or half-handle a dory, are at work at log-rescuing. Incoming ships have found the surface of the ocean brown with logs at these times, and have a great work to get through them.

Now and then a boy takes to the river so strongly that he makes his life work out of its teachings. The captains and engineers of most of our river and harbor steamers, and of bigger craft, too, began life as riverbank boys. Some of them take to fishing in earnest, some become lumbermen, or go into the Coast-Survey service, or the Rivers and Harbors; and the winter work on the ice leads to an interesting life for a good many others. Once in a while one of these boys goes far from home. We have had word of one and another, serving as pilot or engineer in Japanese, Brazilian, and East Indian waters.

The three Tucker brothers, Joel, Reuel, and Amos, three finely-built men, all worked up to be registered pilots. Joel, the eldest, was pilot of an ocean-going steamer all his life. He grew very stout, and had a fine nautical presence, in blue cloth and brass buttons. Reuel was lazy. He never went higher than small raft-towing tugs, and he often gave up his work and loafed about, fishing. He was the man who swam five miles down river, and stopped then because he was bored, not because he was tired. Amos, the finest of them, a gallant looking fellow, with very bright blue eyes, was a pilot for a good many years, and then a foreman in the ice business. He was a man of such shining kindness that he was always up to the handle in work in the heart of his town, as selectman, honorary and volunteer overseer of the poor, and helper-out in general. In a case of all-night nursing, in a poor family, where a man's strength was needed, Amos was on hand, rubbing his eyes, but watchful and ready. Once, when a neighbor's wife had to be taken to the Insane Hospital, Amos undertook the sad task, and his gentleness made it just bearable. Parents looked to him for help in the care of a bad or unruly boy.

Then there were the Tracys, who ran--and still run--a queer little ferry at Jonestown, "according to seasons." When the ice begins to break up they row the passengers across, somehow, in a heavy flat-boat, between the ice cakes. Their regular boat, in which they embark wagons and even a motor, is a large scow pulled across by a chain, with a sail to help when the wind serves. The Tracys' ferry is, I think, unique for one regulation; man and wife go as one fare.

Then came the Great Freshet. Dear me! shall we ever forget it? We woke one March night to hear every bell in town ringing, while a long ominous whistle repeated the terrifying signal of the freshet alarm.

There was a confusion of sounds from the river, wild crashings and grindings and thunders, as the ice broke up in its full strength, with a noise almost like cannon.

Sheds and boat-houses and wharfing were whirled past all day in the tumble of ice cakes. Like other people in danger, the Squatter carried out his gipsy household goods, and moved up town with his family; all but the old French mother. She would not be moved, but sat in the middle of the road on a backless chair, watching her dwelling. She could have done nothing to save it, but nothing could tear her away. The rain poured all that day and the next. Some one lent her a big broken umbrella, and there she sat. I could think of nothing but a forlorn old eaves swallow, watching the place where her mud dwelling was being torn off.

The Lamont family lived a mile north of the Town. They had a ramshackle house and barn, in a bit of open meadow by the mouth of one of the brooks. You might say of the Lamonts that they were so steeped in river mud that every bone of them was lazy and easy and slack. There were the father and mother, and seven children. They were as unkempt and ragged as could be, but they always seemed cheerful and smiling, and the younger children were fat as little dumplings. The three eldest were shambling young men; they and the father seemed perfectly content with a little fishing and odd-jobbing, and now and then one of them took a turn as deck-hand or stevedore, or--as a last resort--as farm-hand. The girls and the mother dug and sold dandelion greens, dock, and thoroughwort and other old-fashioned simples.

None of them had ever gone to school a day beyond the time required by law, and they kept the truant officer busy at that; then all of a sudden the youngest and fattest Lamont, whose incongruous name was Hernaldo, appeared at the High School. He was an imperturbable child, and quite dull, but he worked with a cheerful slow patience. He only held on for a year, but no one had imagined he could keep on for so long, and he did not do badly.

The elders died before the younger children were quite grown, and the family scattered; one night, after it had been empty a year or two, the ramshackle house burned, leaving the barn standing.

His clothes were quite wonderful. He was shining with soap and with fashion, and so full of warmth and of pleasure. He brought out colored photographs of his two fat little children, told of his staff and his patrons, beamed upon everyone, and showed his pretty wife all about our plain High School, admiring and reverent. I think that if it had been Oxford he could not have been prouder, and indeed Oxford could never be to the average student a place of higher achievement than High School to a Lamont!

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