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r the bogs and boulders; now for the arms. Never did our sylvan sojourn look so fair as when we quitted it, and seemed to see among the streaming sunbeams in the shadows the Hamadryads of the spot returned, and waving us adieux. We forgot how damp and leaks and puddles had forced themselves upon our intimacy there; we remembered that we were gay, though wet, and there had known the perfection of Ayboljockameegus trout.
As we drifted along the winding river, between the shimmering birches on either bank, Katahdin watched us well. Sometimes he would show the point of his violet gray peak over the woods, and sometimes, at a broad bend of the water, he revealed himself fully--and threw his great image down beside for our nearer view. We began to forgive him, to disbelieve in any personal spite of his, and to recall that he himself, seen thus, was far more precious than any mappy dulness we could have seen from his summit. One great upright pyramid like this was worth a continent of grovelling acres.
Sunset came, and with it we landed at a point below a lake-like stretch of the river, where the charms of a neighbor and a distant view of the mountain combined. Cancut the Unwearied roofed with boughs an old frame for drying moose-hides, while Iglesias sketched, and I worshipped Katahdin. Has my reader heard enough of it,--a hillock only six thousand feet high? We are soon to drift away, and owe it here as kindly a farewell as it gave us in that radiant twilight by the river.
From our point of view we raked the long stern front tending westward. Just before sunset, from beneath a belt of clouds evanescing over the summit, an inconceivably tender, brilliant glow of rosy violet mantled downward, filling all the valley. Then the violet purpled richer and richer, and darkened slowly to solemn blue, that blended with the gloom of the pines and shadowy channelled gorges down the steep. The peak was still in sunlight, and suddenly, half way down, a band of roseate clouds, twining and changing like a choi