text:
Life in the Open Air/Chapter IX

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.
 * Chapter IX. Chesuncook.

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 teapot, 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 midday 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 the stem. We swept along before the wind, unsteadily, over Lake Chesuncook, at sea in a bowl, — “rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard,” in our keelless craft. Zephyr only followed us, mild as he was strong, and strong as he was mild. Had he been puffy, it would have been all over with us. But the breeze only sang about our way, and shook the water out of sunny calm. Katahdin to the north, a fair blue pyramid, lifted higher and stooped forward more imminent, yet still so many leagues away that his features were undefined, and the gray of his scalp undistinguishable from the green of his beard of forest. Every mile, however, as we slid drowsily over the hot lake, proved more and more that we were not befooled, — Iglesias by memory, and I by anticipation. Katahdin lost nothing by approach, as some of the grandees do: as it grew bigger, it grew better.

Twenty miles, or so, of Chesuncook, of sun-cooked Chesuncook, we traversed by the aid of our blanket-sail, pleasantly wafted by the unboisterous breeze. Undrowned, unducked, as safe from the perils of the broad lake as we had come out of the defiles of the rapids, we landed at the carry below the dam at the lake’s outlet.

The skin of many a slaughtered varmint was nailed on its shingle, and the landing-place was carpeted with the fur. Doughnuts, ex-barkeepers, and civilization at one end of the lake, and here were muskrat-skins, trappers, and the primeval. Two hunters of moose, in default of their fern-horned, blubber-lipped game, had condescended to muskrat, and were making the lower end of Chesuncook fragrant with muskiness.

It is surprising how hospitable and comrade a creature is man. The trappers of muskrats were charmingly brotherly. They guided us across the carry; they would not hear of our being porters. “Pluck the superabundant huckleberry,” said they, “while we, suspending your firkin and your traps upon the setting-pole, tote them, as the spies of Joshua toted the grape-clusters of the Promised Land.”

Cancut, for his share, carried the canoe. He wore it upon his head and shoulders. Tough work he found it, toiling through the underwood, and poking his way like an elongated and mobile mushroom through the thick shrubbery. Ever and anon, as Iglesias and I paused, we would be aware of the canoe thrusting itself above our heads in the covert, and a voice would come from an unseen head under its shell, — “It’s soul-breaking, carrying is!”

The portage was short. We emerged from the birchen grove upon the river, below a brilliant cascading rapid. The water came flashing gloriously forward, a far other element than the tame, flat stuff we had drifted slowly over all the dullish hours. Water on the go is nobler than water on the stand; recklessness may be as fatal as stagnation, but it is more heroic.

Presently, over the edge, where the foam and spray were springing up into sunshine, our canoe suddenly appeared, and had hardly appeared, when, as if by one leap, it had passed the rapid, and was gliding in the stiller current at our feet. One of the muskrateers had relieved Cancut of his headpiece, and shot the lower rush of water. We again embarked, and, guided by the trappers in their own canoe, paddled out upon Lake Pepogenus.

title: Life in the Open Air/Chapter IX


text:
Life in the Open Air/Chapter X

Ripogenus is a tarn, a lovely oval tarn, within a rim of forest and hill; and there behold, O gioja! at its eastern end, stooping forward and filling the sphere, was Katahdin, large and alone.
 * Chapter X. Ripogenus.

But we must hasten, for day wanes, and we must see and sketch this cloudless summit from terra firma, A mile and half-way down the lake, we landed at the foot of a grassy hill-side, where once had been a lumberman’s station and hay-farm. It was abandoned now, and lonely in that deeper sense in which widowhood is lonelier than celibacy, a home deserted lonelier than a desert. Tumble-down was the never-painted house; ditto its three barns. But, besides a camp, there were two things to be had here, — one certain, one possible, probable even. The view, that was an inevitable certainty; Iglesias would bag that as his share of the plunder of Ripogenus. For my bagging, bears, perchance, awaited. The trappers had seen a bear near the barns. Cancut, in his previous visit, had seen a disappearance of bear. No sooner had the birch’s bow touched lightly upon the shore than we seized our respective weapons, — Iglesias his peaceful and creative sketch-book, I my warlike and destructive gun, — and dashed up the hill-side.

I made for the barns to catch Bruin napping or lolling in the old hay. I entertain a vendetta toward the ursine family. I had a duello, pistol against claw, with one of them in the mountains of Oregon, and have nothing to show to point the moral and adorn the tale. My antagonist of that hand-to-hand fight received two shots, and then dodged into cover and was lost in the twilight. Soon or late in my life, I hoped that I should avenge this evasion. Ripogenus would, perhaps, give what the Nachchese Pass had taken away.

Vain hope! I was not to be an ursicide. I begin to fear that I shall slay no other than my proper personal bearishness. I did my duty for another result at Ripogenus. I bolted audaciously into every barn. I made incursions into the woods around. I found the mark of the beast, not the beast. He had not long ago decamped, and was now, perhaps, sucking the meditative paw hard-by in an arbor of his bear-garden.

After a vain hunt, I gave up Beast and turned to Beauty. I looked about me, seeing much.

Foremost I saw a fellow-man, my comrade, fondled by breeze and brightness, and whispered to by all sweet sounds. I saw Iglesias below me, on the slope, sketching. He was preserving the scene at its bel momento. I repented more bitterly of my momentary falseness to Beauty while I saw him so constant.

Furthermore, I saw a landscape of vigorous simplicity, easy to comprehend. By mellow sunset the grass slope of the old farm seemed no longer tanned and rusty, but ripened. The oval lake was blue and calm, and that is already much to say; shadows of the western hills were growing over it, but flight after flight of illumined cloud soared above, to console the sky and the water for the coming of night. Northward, a forest darkled, whose glades of brightness I could not see. Eastward, the bank mounted abruptly to a bare fire-swept table-land, whereon a few dead trees stood, parched and ghostly skeletons draped with rags of moss.

Furthermost and topmost, I saw Katahdin twenty miles away, a giant undwarfed by any rival. The remainder landscape was only minor and judiciously accessory. The hills were low before it, the lake lowly, and upright above lake and hill lifted the mountain pyramid. Isolate greatness tells. There were no underling mounts about this mountain-in-chief. And now on its shoulders and crest sunset shone, glowing. Warm violet followed the glow, soothing away the harshness of granite lines. Luminous violet dwelt upon the peak, while below the clinging forests were purple in sheltered gorges, where they could climb nearer the summit, loved of light, and lower down gloomed green and sombre in the shadow.

Meanwhile, as I looked, the quivering violet rose higher and higher, and at last floated away like a disengaged flame. A smouldering blue dwelt upon the peak. Ashy-gray overcame the blue. As dusk thickened and stars trembled into sight, the gray grew luminous. Katahdin’s mighty presence seemed to absorb such dreamy glimmers as float in limpid night-airs: a faint glory, a twilight of its own, clothed it. King of the daylit-world, it became queen of the dimmer realms of night, and like a woman-queen it did not disdain to stoop and study its loveliness in the polished lake, and stooping thus it overhung the earth, a shadowy creature of gleam and gloom, an eternized cloud.

I sat staring and straying in sweet reverie, until the scene before me was dim as metaphysics. Suddenly a flame flashed up in the void. It grew and steadied, and dark objects became visible about it. In the loneliness — for Iglesias had disappeared — I allowed myself a moment’s luxury of superstition. Were these the Cyclops of Katahdin? Possibly. Were they Trolls forging diabolic enginery, or Gypsies of Yankeedom? I will see, — and went tumbling down the hill-side.

As I entered the circle about the cooking-fire of drift-wood by the lake, Iglesias said, —

“The beef-steak and the mutton-chops will do for breakfast; now, then, with your bear!”

“Haw, haw!” guffawed Cancut; and the sound, taking the lake at a stride, found echoes everywhere, till he grew silent and peered suspiciously into the dark.

“There’s more bears raound ’n yer kin shake a stick at,” said one of the muskrateers. “I wouldn’t ricommend yer to stir ’em up naow, haowlin’ like that.”

“I meant it for laffin’,” said Cancut, humbly.

“Ef yer call that ’ere larfin’, couldn’t yer cry a little to kind er slick daown the bears?” said the trapper.

Iglesias now invited us to chocolat à la crème, made with the boon of the ex-barkeeper. I suppose I may say, without flattery, that this tipple was marvellous. What a pity Nature spoiled a cook by making the muddler of that chocolate a painter of grandeurs! When Fine Art is in a man’s nature, it must exude, as pitch leaks from a pine-tree. Our muskrat-hunters partook injudiciously of this unaccustomed dainty, and were visited with indescribable Nemesis. They had never been acclimated to chocolate, as had Iglesias and I, by sipping it under the shade of the mimosa and the palm.

Up to a certain point, an unlucky hunter is more likely to hunt than a lucky. Satiety follows more speedily upon success than despair upon failure. Let us thank Heaven for that, brethren dear! I had bagged not a bear, and must needs satisfy my assassin instincts upon something with hoofs and horns. The younger trapper of muskrat, being young, was ardent, — being young, was hopeful, — being young, believed in exceptions to general rules, — and being young, believed that, given a good fellow with a gun, Nature would provide a victim. Therefore he proposed that we should canoe it along the shallows in this sweetest and stillest of all the nights. The senior shook his head incredulously; Iglesias shook his head noddingly.

“Since you have massacred all the bears,” said Iglesias, “I will go lay me down in their lair in the barn. If you find me cheek-by-jowl with Ursa Major when you come back, make a pun and he will go.”

It was stiller than stillness upon the lake. Ripogenus, it seemed, had never listened to such silence as this. Calm never could have been so beyond the notion of calm. Stars in the empyrean and stars in Ripogenus winked at each other across ninety-nine billions of leagues as uninterruptedly as boys at a boarding-school table.

I knelt amidships in the birch with gun and rifle on either side. The pilot gave one stroke of his paddle, and we floated out upon what seemed the lake. Whatever we were poised and floating upon he hesitated to shatter with another dip of his paddle, lest he should shatter the thin basis and sink toward heaven and the stars.

Presently the silence seemed to demand gentle violence, and the unwavering water needed slight tremors to teach it the tenderness of its calm; then my guide used his blade, and cut into glassiness. We crept noiselessly along by the lake-edge, within the shadows of the pines. With never a plash we slid. Bare drops fell from the cautious paddle and tinkled on the surface, overshot, not parted by, our imponderable passage. Sometimes from far within the forest would come sounds of rustling branches or crackling twigs. Somebody of life approaches with stealthy tread. Gentlier, even gentlier, my steersman! Take up no pearly drop from the lake, mother of pearliness, lest falling it sound too loudly. Somewhat comes. Let it come unterrified to our ambush among the shadows by the shore.

Somewhat, something, somebody was coming, perhaps, but some other thing or body thwarted it and it came not. To glide over glassiness while uneventful moments link themselves into hours is monotonous. Night and stillness laid their soothing spell upon me. I was entranced. I lost myself out of time and space, and seemed to be floating unimpelled and purposeless, nowhere in Forever.

Somewhere in Now I suddenly found myself.

There he was! There was the moose trampling and snorting hard by, in the shallows of Ripogenus, trampling out of being the whole nadir of stars, making the world conscious of its lost silence by the death of silence in tumult.

I trembled with sudden eagerness. I seized my gun. In another instant I should have lodged the fatal pellet! when a voice whispered over my shoulder, — “I kinder guess yer’ve ben asleep an’ dreamin’, ha’n’t yer?”

So I had.

Never a moose came down to cool his clumsy snout in the water and swallow reflections of stars. Never a moose abandoned dry-browse in the bitter woods for succulent lily-pads, full in their cells and veins of water and sunlight. Till long past midnight we paddled and watched and listened, whisperless. In vain. At last, as we rounded a point, the level gleam of our dying camp-fire athwart the water reminded us of passing hours and traveller duties, of rest to-night and toil to-morrow.

My companions, fearless as if there were no bears this side of Ursa Major, were bivouacked in one of the barns. There I entered skulkingly, as a gameless hunter may, and hid my untrophied head beneath a mound of ancient hay, not without the mustiness of its age.

No one clawed us, no one chawed us, that night. A Ripogenus chill awaked the whole party with early dawn. We sprang from our nests, shook the hay-seed out of our hair, and were full-dressed without more ceremony, ready for whatever grand sensation Nature might purvey for our æsthetic breakfast.

Nothing is ever as we expect. When we stepped into out-of-doors, looking for Ripogenus, a lake of Maine, we found not a single aquatic fact in the landscape. Ripogenus, a lake, had mizzled, (as the Americans say,) literally mizzled. Our simplified view comprised a grassy hill with barns, and a stern positive pyramid, surely Katahdin; aloft, beyond, above, below, thither, hither, and yon, Fog,— not fog, but FOG.

Ripogenus, the water-body, had had aspirations, and a boon of brief transfiguration into a cloud-body had been granted it by Nature, who grants to every terrestrial essence prophetic experiences of what it one day would be.

In short, and to repeat, Ripogenus had transmuted itself into vapor, and filled the valley full to our feet. A faint wind had power to billow this mist-lake, and drive cresting surges up against the eastern hill-side, over which they sometimes broke, and, involving it totally, rolled clear and free toward Katahdin, where he stood hiding the glows of sunrise. Leagues higher up than the mountain rested a presence of cirri, already white and luminous with full daylight, and from them drooped linking wreaths of orange mist, clinging to the rosy-violet granite of the peak.

Up clomb and sailed Ripogenus and befogged the whole; then we condescended to breakfast.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Life in the Open Air/Chapter X


text:
Life in the Open Air/Chapter XI

Singularly enough, mill-dams are always found below mill-ponds. Analogously in the Maine rivers, below the lakes, rapids are. Rapids too often compel carries. While we breakfasted without steak of boar or cutlet of moose, Ripogenus gradually retracted itself, and became conscious again of what poetry there is in a lake’s pause and a rapid’s flow. Fog condensed into water, and water submitting to its destiny went cascading down through a wild defile where no birch could follow.
 * Chapter XI. Toward Katahdin.

The Ripogenus carry is three miles long, a faint path through thickets.

“First half,” said Cancut, “’s plain enough; but after that ’t would take a philosopher with his spectacles on to find it.”

This was discouraging. Philosophers twain we might deem ourselves; but what is a craftsman without tools? And never a goggle had we.

But the trappers of muskrats had become our fast friends. They insisted upon lightening our loads over the brambly league. This was kindly. Cancut’s elongated head-piece, the birch, was his share of the burden; and a bag of bread, a firkin of various grub, damp blankets for three, and multitudinous traps, seemed more than two could carry at one trip over this longest and roughest of portages.

We paddled from the camp to the lake-foot, and there, while the others compacted the portables for portage, Iglesias and I, at cost of a ducking with mist-drops from the thickets, scrambled up a crag for a supreme view of the fair lake and the clear mountain. And we did well. Katahdin, from the hill guarding the exit of the Penobscot from Ripogenus, is eminent and emphatic, a signal and solitary pyramid, grander than any below the realms of the unchangeable, more distinctly mountainous than any mountain of those that stop short of the venerable honors of eternal snow.

We trod the trail, we others, easier than Cancut. He found it hard to thread the mazes of an overgrown path and navigate his canoe at the same time. “Better,” thought he, as he staggered and plunged and bumped along, extricating his boat-bonnet now from a bower of raspberry-bushes, now from the branches of a brotherly birch-tree, — “better,” thought he, “were I seated in what I bear, and bounding gayly over the billow. Peril is better than pother.”

Bushwhacking thus for a league, we circumvented the peril, and came upon the river flowing fair and free. The trappers said adieu, and launched us. Back then they went to consult their traps and flay their fragrant captives, and we shot forward.

That was a day all poetry and all music. Mountain airs bent and blunted the noonday sunbeams. There was shade of delicate birches on either hand, whenever we loved to linger. Our feather-shallop went dancing on, fleet as the current, and whenever a passion for speed came after moments of luxurious sloth, we could change floating at the river’s will into leaps and chasing, with a few strokes of the paddle. All was untouched, unvisited wilderness, and we from bend to bend the first discoverers. So we might fancy ourselves; for civilization had been here only to cut pines, not to plant houses. Yet these fair curves, and liberal reaches, and bright rapids of the birchen-bowered river were only solitary, not lonely. It is never lonely with Nature. Without unnatural men or unnatural beasts, she is capital society by herself. And so we found her, — a lovely being in perfect toilet, which I describe, in an indiscriminating, masculine way, by saying that it was a forest and a river and lakes and a mountain and doubtless sky, all made resplendent by her judicious disposition of a most becoming light. Iglesias and I, being old friends, were received into close intimacy. She smiled upon us unaffectedly, and had a thousand exquisite things to say, drawing us out also, with feminine tact, to say our best things, and teaching us to be conscious, in her presence, of more delicate possibilities of refinement and a tenderer poetic sense. So we voyaged through the sunny hours, and were happy.

Yet there was no monotony in our progress. We could not always drift and glide. Sometimes we must fight our way. Below the placid reaches were the inevitable “rips” and rapids: some we could shoot without hitting anything; some would hit us heavily, did we try to shoot. Whenever the rocks in the current were only as thick as the plums in a boarding-school pudding, we could venture to run the gantlet; whenever they multiplied to a school-boy’s ideal, we were arrested. Just at the brink of peril we would sweep in by an eddy into a shady pool by the shore. At such spots we found a path across the carry. Cancut at once proceeded to bonnet himself with the trickling birch. Iglesias and I took up the packs and hurried on with minds intent on berries. Berries we always found, — blueberries covered with a cloudy bloom, blueberries pulpy, saccharine, plenteous.

Often, when a portage was not quite necessary, a dangerous bit of white water would require the birch to be lightened. Cancut must steer her alone over the foam, while we, springing ashore, raced through the thick of the forest, tore through the briers, and plunged through the punk of trees older than history, now rotting where they fell, slain by Time the Giganticide. Cancut then had us at advantage. Sometimes we had laughed at. him, when he, a good-humored malaprop, made vague clutches at the thread of discourse. Now suppose he should take a fancy to drop down stream and leave us. What then? Berries then, and little else, unless we had a chance at a trout or a partridge. It is not cheery, but dreary, to be left in pathlessness, blanketless, guideless, and with breadths of lake and mountain and Nature, shaggy and bearish, between man and man. With the consciousness of a latent shudder in our hearts at such a possibility, we parted brier and bramble until the rapid was passed, we scuffled hastily through to the river-bank, and there always, in some quiet nook, was a beacon of red-flannel shirt among the green leaves over the blue and shadowy water, and always the fast-sailing Cancut awaiting us, making the woods resound to amicable hails, and ready again to be joked and to retaliate.

Such alternations made our voyage a charming olla. We had the placid glide, the fleet dash, the wild career, the pause, the landing, the agreeable interlude of a portage, and the unburdened stampede along-shore. Thus we won our way, or our way wooed us on, until, in early afternoon, a lovely lakelet opened before us. The fringed shores retired, and, as we shot forth upon wider calm, lo, Katahdin! unlooked for, at last, as a revolution. Our boat ruffled its shadow, doing pretty violence to its dignity, that we might know the greater grandeur of the substance. There was a gentle agency of atmosphere softening the bold forms of this startling neighbor, and giving it distance, lest we might fear it would topple and crush us. Clouds, level below, hid the summit and towered aloft. Among them we might imagine the mountain rising with thousands more of feet of heaven-piercing height: there is one degree of sublimity in mystery, as there is another degree in certitude. We lay to in a shady nook, just off Katahdin’s reflection in the river, while Iglesias sketched him. Meanwhile I, analyzing my view, presently discovered a droll image in the track of a land-avalanche down the front. It was a comical fellow, a little giant, a colossal dwarf, six hundred feet high, and should have been thrice as tall, had it had any proper development, — for out of his head grew two misdirected skeleton legs, “hanging down and dangling.” The countenance was long, elfin, sneering, solemn, as of a truculent demon, saddish for his trade, an ashamed, but unrepentant rascal. He had two immense erect ears, and in his boisterous position had suffered a loss of hair, wearing nothing save an impudent scalp-lock. A very grotesque personage. Was he the guardian imp, the legendary Eft of Katahdin, scoffing already at us as verdant, and warning that he would make us unhappy, if we essayed to appear in demon realms and on Brocken heights without initiation?

“A terrible pooty mountain,” Cancut observed; and so it is.

Not to fail in topographical duty, I record, that near this lakelet flows in the river Sowadehunk, and not far below, a sister streamlet, hardly less melodiously named Ayboljockameegus. Opposite the latter we landed and encamped, with Katahdin full in front, and broadly visible.

title: Life in the Open Air/Chapter XI


text:
Life in the Open Air/Chapter XII

Our camping-place was worthy of its view. On the bank, high and dry, a noble yellow birch had been strong enough to thrust back the forest, making a glade for its own private abode. Other travellers had already been received in this natural pavilion. We had had predecessors, and they had built them a hut, a half roof of hemlock bark, resting on a frame. Time had developed the wrinkles in this covering into cracks, and cracks only wait to be leaks. First, then, we must mend our mansion. Material was at hand; hemlocks, with a back-load of bark, stood ready to be disburdened. In August they have worn their garment so long that they yield it unwillingly. Cancut’s axe, however, was insinuating, not to say peremptory. He peeled off and brought great scales of rough purple roofing, and we disposed them, according to the laws of forest architecture, upon our cabin. It became a good example of the renaissance. Storm, if such a traveller were approaching, was shut out at top and sides; our blankets could become curtains in front and completely hide us from that unwelcome vagrant, should he peer about seeking whom he might duck and what he might damage.
 * Chapter XII. Camp Katahdin.

Our lodge, built, must be furnished. We need a luxurious carpet, couch, and bed; and if we have these, will be content without secondary articles. Here, too, material was ready, and only the artist wanting, to use it. While Cancut peeled the hemlocks, Iglesias and I stripped off armfuls of boughs and twigs from the spruces to “bough down” our camp. “Boughing down” is shingling the floor elaborately with evergreen foliage; and when it is done well, the result counts among the high luxuries of the globe. As the feathers of this bed are harsh stems covered with leafage, the process of bed-making must be systematic, the stems thoroughly covered, and the surface smooth and elastic. I have slept on the various beds of the world, — in a hammock, in a pew, on German feathers, on a bear-skin, on a mat, on a hide; all, all give but a feeble, restless, unrecreating slumber, compared to the spruce or hemlock bed in a forest of Maine. This is fragrant, springy, soft, well-fitting, better than any Sybarite’s couch of uncrumpled rose-leaves. It sweetly rustles when you roll, and, by a gentle titillation with the little javelin-leaves, keeps up a pleasant electricity over the cuticle. Rheumatism never, after nights on such a bed; agues never; vigor, ardor, fervor, always.

We despatched our camp-building and bed-making with speed, for we had a purpose. The Penobscot was a very beautiful river, and the Ayboljockameegus a very pretty stream; and if there is one place in the world where trout, at certain seasons, are likely to be found, it is in a beautiful river at the mouth of a pretty stream. Now we wanted trout; it was in the programme that something more delicate than salt-pork should grace our banquets before Katahdin. Cancut sustained our a priori, that trout were waiting for us over by the Aybol. By this time the tree-shadows, so stiff at noon, began to relax and drift down stream, cooling the surface. The trout could leave their shy lairs down in the chilly deeps, and come up without fear of being parboiled. Besides, as evening came, trout thought of their supper, as we did of ours.

Hereupon I had a new sensation. We made ready our flies and our rods, and embarked, as I supposed, to be ferried across and fish from terra firma. But no. Cancut dropped anchor very quietly opposite the Aybol’s mouth. Iglesias, the man of Maine experience, seemed naught surprised. We were to throw our lines, as it appeared, from the birch; we were to peril our lives on the unsteady basis of a roly-poly vessel, — to keep our places and ballast our bowl, during the excitement of hooking pounds. Self-poise is an acrobatic feat, when a person, not loaded at the heels, undertakes trout-fishing from a birch.

We threw our flies. Instantly at the lucky hackle something darted, seized it, and whirled to fly, with the unwholesome bit in its mouth, up the peaceful Ayboljockameegus. But the lucky man, and he happened to be the novice, forgot, while giving the capturing jerk of his hook, that his fulcrum was not solid rock. The slight shell tilted, turned — over not quite, over enough to give everybody a start. One lesson teaches the docile. Caution thereafter presided over our fishing. She told us to sit low, keep cool, cast gently, strike firmly, play lightly, and pull in steadily. So we did. As the spotted sparklers were rapidly translated from water to a lighter element, a well-fed cheerfulness developed in our trio. We could not speak, for fear of breaking the spell; we smiled at each other. Twenty-three times the smile went round. Twenty-three trout, and not a pigmy among them, lay at our feet. More fish for one dinner and breakfast would be waste and wanton self-indulgence. We stopped. And I must avow, not to claim too much heroism, that the fish had also stopped. So we paddled home contented.

Then, O Walton! O Davy! O Scrope! ye fishers hard by taverns! luxury was ours of which ye know no more than a Chinaman does of music. Under the noble yellow birch we cooked our own fish. We used our scanty kitchen-battery with skill. We cooked with the high art of simplicity. Where Nature has done her best, only fools rush in to improve: on the salmonids, fresh and salt, she has lavished her creative refinements; cookery should only ripen and develop. From our silver gleaming pile of pounders, we chose the larger and the smaller for appropriate experiments. Then we tested our experiments; we tasted our examples. Success. And success in science proves knowledge and skill. We feasted. The delicacy of our food made each feaster a finer essence.

So we supped, reclined upon our couch of spruce-twigs. In our good cheer we pitied the Eft of Katahdin: he might sneer, but he was supperless. We were grateful to Nature for the grand mountain, for the fair and sylvan woods, for the lovely river and what it had yielded us.

By the time we had finished our flaky fare and sipped our chocolate from the Magdalena, Night announced herself, — Night, a jealous, dark lady, eclipsed and made invisible all her rivals, that she might solely possess us. Night’s whispers lulled us. The rippling river, the rustling leaves, the hum of insects, grew more audible; and these are gentle sounds that prove wide quietude in Nature, and tell man that the burr and buzz in his day-laboring brain have ceased, and he had better be breathing deep in harmony. So we disposed ourselves upon the fragrant couch of spruce-boughs, and sank slowly and deeper into sleep, as divers sink into the thick waters down below, into the dreamy waters far below the plunge of sunshine.

By and by, as the time came for rising to the surface again, and the mind began to be half conscious of facts without it, as the diver may half perceive light through thinning strata of sea, there penetrated through my last layers of slumber a pungent odor of wetted embers. It was raining quietly. Drip was the pervading sound, as if the rain-drops were counting aloud the leaves of the forest. Evidently a resolute and permanent wetting impended. On rainy days one does not climb Katahdin. Instead of rising by starlight, breakfasting by gray, and starting by rosy dawn, it would be policy to persuade night to linger long into the hours of a dull day. When daylight finally came, dim and sulky, there was no rivalry among us which should light the fire. We did not leap, but trickled slowly forth into the inhospitable morning, all forlorn. Wet days in camp try “grit.” “Clear grit” brightens more crystalline, the more it is rained upon; sham grit dissolves into mud and water.

Yankees, who take in pulverized granite with every breath of their native dust, are not likely to melt in a drizzle. We three certainly did not. We reacted stoutly against the forlorn weather, unpacking our internal stores of sunshine, as a camel in a desert draws water from his inner tank when outer water fails. We made the best of it. A breakfast of trout and trimmings looks nearly as well and tastes nearly as well in a fog as in a glare: that we proved by experience at Camp Katahdin.

We could not climb the mountain dark and dim; we would not be idle: what was to be done? Much. Much for sport and for use. We shouldered the axe and sallied into the dripping forest. Only a faint smoke from the smouldering logs curled up among the branches of the yellow birch over camp. We wanted a big smoke, and chopped at the woods for fuel. Speaking for myself, I should say that our wood-work was ill done. Iglesias smiled at my axe-handling, and Cancut at his, as chopping we sent chips far and wide.

The busy, keen, short strokes of the axe resounded through the forest. When these had done their work, and the bungler paused amid his wasteful débris to watch his toil’s result, first was heard a rustle of leaves, as if a passing whirlwind had alighted there; next came the crack of bursting sinews; then the groan of a great riving spasm, and the tree, decapitated at its foot, crashed to earth, with a vain attempt to clutch for support at the stiff, unpitying arms of its woodland brotherhood.

Down was the tree, — fallen, but so it should not lie. This tree we proposed to promote from brute matter, mere lumber, downcast and dejected, into finer essence: fuel was to be made into fire.

First, however, the fuel must be put into portable shape. We top-sawyers went at our prostrate and vanquished non-resistant, and without mercy mangled and dismembered him, until he was merely a bare trunk, a torso incapable of restoration.

While we were thus busy, useful, and happy, the dripping rain, like a clepsydra, told off the morning moments. The dinner-hour drew nigh. We had determined on a feast, and trout were to be its daintiest dainty. But before we cooked our trout, we must, according to sage Kitchener’s advice, catch our trout. They were, we felt confident, awaiting us in the refrigerate larder at hand. We waited until the confusing pepper of a shower had passed away and left the water calm. Then softly and deftly we propelled our bark across to the Ayboljockameegus. We tossed to the fish humbugs of wool, silk, and feathers, gauds such as captivate the greedy or the guileless. Again the “gobemouches” trout, the fellows on the look-out for novelty, dashed up and swallowed disappointing juiceless morsels, and with them swallowed hooks.

We caught an apostolic boat-load of beauties fresh and blooming as Aurora, silver as the morning star, gemmy with eye-spots as a tiger-lily.

O feast most festal! Iglesias, of course, was the great artist who devised and mainly executed it. As well as he could, he covered his pot and pan from the rain, admitting only enough to season each dish with gravy direct from the skies. As day had ripened, the banquet grew ripe. Then as day declined, we reclined on our triclinium of hemlock and spruce boughs, and made high festival, toasting each other in the uninebriating flow of our beverages. Jollity reigned. Cancut fattened, and visibly broadened. Toward the veriest end of the banquet, we seemed to feel that there had been a slight sameness in its courses. The Bill of Fare, however, proved the freest variety. And at the close we sat and sipped our chocolate with uttermost content. No garçon, cringing, but firm, would here intrude with the unhandsome bill. Nothing to pay is the rarest of pleasures. This dinner we had caught ourselves, we had cooked ourselves, and had eaten for the benefit of ourselves and no other. There was nothing to repent of afterwards in the way of extravagance, and certainly nothing of indigestion. Indigestion in the forest primeval, in the shadow of Katahdin, is impossible.

While we dined, we talked of our to-morrow’s climb of Katahdin. We were hopeful. We disbelieved in obstacles. To-morrow would be fine. We would spring early from our elastic bed and stride topwards. Iglesias nerved himself and me with a history of his ascent some years before, up the eastern side of the mountain. He had left the house of Mr. Hunt, the outsider at that time of Eastern Maine, with a squad of lumbermen, and with them tramped up the furrow of a land-avalanche to the top, spending wet and ineffective days in the dripping woods, and vowing then to return and study the mountain from our present camping-spot. I recalled also the first recorded ascent of the Natardin or Catardin Mountain by Mr. Turner in 1804, printed in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Collections, and identified the stream up whose valley he climbed with the Ayboljockameegus. Cancut offered valuable contributions to our knowledge from his recent ascent with our Boston predecessors. To-morrow we would verify our recollections and our fancies.

And so good night, and to our spruce bed.

title: Life in the Open Air/Chapter XII


text:
Life in the Open Air/Chapter XIII

Next morning, when we awoke, just before the gray of dawn, the sky was clear and scintillating; but there was a white cotton night-cap on the head of Katahdin. As we inspected him, he drew his night-cap down farther, hinting that he did not wish to see the sun that day. When a mountain is thus in the sulks after a storm, it is as well not to disturb him: he will not offer the prize of a view. Experience taught us this: but then experience is only an empiric at the best.
 * Chapter XIII. Up Katahdin.

Besides, whether Katahdin were bare-headed or cloud-capped, it would be better to blunder upward than lounge all day in camp and eat Sybaritic dinners. We longed for the nervy climb. We must have it. “Up!” said tingling blood to brain. “Dash through the forest! Grasp the crag, and leap the cleft! Sweet flash forth the streamlets from granite fissures. To breathe the winds that smite the peaks is life.”

As soon as dawn bloomed in the woods we breakfasted, and ferried the river before sunrise. The ascent subdivides itself into five zones. 1. A scantily wooded acclivity, where bears abound. 2. A dense, swampy forest region. 3. Steep, mossy mountain-side, heavily wooded. 4. A belt of dwarf spruces, nearly impenetrable. 6. Ragged rock.

Cancut was our leader to-day. There are by far too many blueberries in the first zone. No one, of course, intends to dally, but the purple beauties tempted, and too often we were seduced. Still such yielding spurred us on to hastier speed, when we looked up after delay and saw the self-denying far ahead.

To write an epic or climb a mountain is merely a dogged thing; the result is more interesting to most than the process. Mountains, being cloud-compellers, are rain-shedders, and the shed water will not always flow with decorous gayety in dell or glen. Sometimes it stays bewildered in a bog, and here the climber must plunge. In the moist places great trees grow, die, fall, rot, and barricade the way with their corpses. Katahdin has to endure all the ills of mountain being, and we had all the usual difficulties to fight through doggedly. When we were clumsy, we tumbled and rose up torn. Still we plodded oh, following a path blazed by the Bostonians, Cancut’s late charge, and we grumblingly thanked them.

Going up, we got higher and drier. The mountain-side became steeper than it could stay, and several land-avalanches, ancient or modern, crossed our path. It would be sad to think that all the eternal hills were crumbling thus, outwardly, unless we knew that they bubble up inwardly as fast. Posterity is thus cared for in regard to the picturesque. Cascading streams also shot by us, carrying light and music. From them we stole refreshment, and did not find the waters mineral and astringent, as Mr. Turner, the first climber, calumniously asserts.

The trees were still large and surprisingly parallel to the mountain wall. Deep soft moss covered whatever was beneath, and sometimes this would yield and let the foot measure a crevice. Perilous pitfalls; but we clambered unharmed. The moss, so rich, deep, soft, and earthily fragrant, was a springy stair-carpet of a steep stairway. And sometimes when the carpet slipped and the state of heels over head seemed imminent, we held to the baluster-trees, as one after wassail clings to the lamp-post.

Even on this minor mountain the law of diminishing vegetation can be studied. The great trees abandoned us, and stayed indolently down in shelter. Next the little wiry trees ceased to be the comrades of our climb. They were no longer to be seen planted upon jutting crags, and, bold as standard-bearers, inciting us to mount higher. Big spruces, knobby with balls of gum, dwindled away into little ugly dwarf spruces, hostile, as dwarfs are said to be always, to human comfort. They grew man-high, and hedged themselves together into a dense thicket. We could not go under, nor over, nor through. To traverse them at all, we must recall the period when we were squirrels or cats, in some former state of being.

Somehow we pierced, as man does ever, whether he owes it to the beast or the man in him. From time to time, when in this struggle we came to an open point of rock, we would remember that we were on high, and turn to assure ourselves that nether earth was where we had left it. We always found it in situ, in belts green, white, and blue, a tricolor of woods, water, and sky. Lakes were there without number, forest without limit. We could not analyze yet, for there was work to do. Also, whenever we paused, there was the old temptation, blueberries. Every outcropping ledge offered store of tonic, ozone-fed blueberries, or of mountain-cranberries, crimson and of concentrated flavor, or of the white snowberry, most delicate of fruits that grow.

As we were creeping over the top of the dwarf wood, Cancut, who was in advance, suddenly disappeared; he seemed to fall through a gap in the spruces, and we heard his voice calling in cavernous tones. We crawled forward and looked over. It was the upper camp of the Bostonians. They had profited by a hole in the rocks, and chopped away the stunted scrubs to enlarge it into a snug artificial abyss. It was snug, and so to the eye is a cell at Sing-Sing. If they were very misshapen Bostonians, they may have succeeded in lying there comfortably. I looked down ten feet into the rough chasm, and I saw, Corpo di Bacco! I saw a cork.

To this station our predecessors had come in an easy day’s walk from the river; here they had tossed through a night, and given a whole day to finish the ascent, returning hither again for a second night. As we purposed to put all this travel within one day, we could not stay and sympathize with the late tenants. A little more squirrel-like skipping and cat-like creeping over the spruces, and we were out among bulky boulders and rough débris on a shoulder of the mountain. Alas! the higher, the more hopeless. Katahdin, as he had taken pains to inform us, meant to wear the veil all day. He was drawing down the white drapery about his throat and letting it fall over his shoulders. Sun and wind struggled mightily with his sulky fit; sunshine rifted off bits of the veil, and wind seized, whirled them away, and, dragging them over the spruces below, tore them to rags. Evidently, if we wished to see the world, we must stop here and survey, before the growing vapor covered all. We climbed to the edge of Cloudland, and stood fronting the semicircle of southward view.

Katahdin’s self is finer than what Katahdin sees. Katahdin is distinct, and its view is indistinct. It is a vague panorama, a mappy, unmethodic maze of water and woods, very roomy, very vast, very simple, — and these are capital qualities, but also quite monotonous. A lover of largeness and scope has the proper emotions stirred, but a lover of variety very soon finds himself counting the lakes. It is a wide view, and it is a proud thing for a man six feet or less high, to feel that he himself, standing on something he himself has climbed, and having Katahdin under his feet a mere convenience, can see all Maine. It does not make Maine less, but the spectator more, and that is a useful moral result. Maine’s face, thus exposed, has almost no features; there are no great mountains visible, none that seem more than green hillocks in the distance. Besides sky, Katahdin’s view contains only the two primal necessities of wood and water. Nowhere have I seen such breadth of solemn forest, gloomy, were it not for the cheerful interruption of many fair lakes, and bright ways of river linking them.

Far away on the southern horizon we detected the heights of Mount Desert, our old familiar haunt. All the northern semicircle was lost to us by the fog. We lost also the view of the mountain itself. All the bleak, lonely, barren, ancient waste of the bare summit was shrouded in cold fog. The impressive gray ruin and Titanic havoc of a granite mountain-top, the heaped boulders, the crumbling crags, the crater-like depression, the long stem reaches of sierra, the dark curving slopes channelled and polished by the storms and fine drifting mists of æons, the downright plunge of precipices, all the savageness of harsh rock, unsoftened by other vegetation than rusty moss and the dull green splashes of lichen, all this was hidden, except when the mist, white and delicate where we stood, but thick and black above, opened whimsically and delusively, as mountain mists will do, and gave us vistas into the upper desolation. After such momentary rifts the mist thickened again, and swooped forward as if to involve our station; but noon sunshine, reverberated from the plains and valleys and lakes below, was our ally; sunshine checked the overcoming mist, and it stayed overhead, an unwelcome parasol, making our August a chilly November. Besides what our eyes lost, our minds lost, unless they had imagination enough to create it, the sentiment of triumph and valiant energy, that the man of body and soul feels upon the windy heights, the highest, whence he looks far and wide, like a master of realms, and knows that the world is his; and they lost the sentiment of solemn joy that the man of soul recognizes as one of the surest intimations of immortality, stirring within him, whenever he is in the unearthly regions, the higher world.

We stayed studying the pleasant solitude and dreamy breadth of Katahdin’s panorama for a long time, and every moment the mystery of the mist above grew more enticing. Pride also was awakened. We turned from sunshine and Cosmos into fog and Chaos. We made ourselves quite miserable for naught. We clambered up into Nowhere, into a great, white, ghostly void. We saw nothing but the rough surfaces we trod. We pressed along crater-like edges, and all below was filled with mist, troubled and rushing upward like the smoke of a volcano. Up we went, — nothing but granite and gray dimness. Where we arrived we know not. It was a top, certainly: that was proved by the fact that there was nothing within sight. We cannot claim that it was the topmost top; Kimchinjinga might have towered within pistol-shot; popgun-shot was our extremest range of vision, except for one instant, when a kind-hearted sunbeam gave us a vanishing glimpse of a white lake and breadth of forest far in the unknown North toward Canada.

When we had thus reached the height of our folly and made nothing by it, we addressed ourselves to the descent, no wiser for our pains. Descent is always harder than ascent, for divine ambitions are stronger and more prevalent than degrading passions. And when Katahdin is befogged, descent is much more perilous than ascent. We edged along very cautiously by remembered landmarks the way we had come, and so, after a dreary march of a mile or so through desolation, issued into welcome sunshine and warmth at our point of departure. When I said “we,” I did not include the gravestone pedler. He, like a sensible fellow, had determined to stay and eat berries rather than breathe fog. While we wasted our time, he had made the most of his. He had cleared Katahdin’s shoulders of fruit, and now, cuddled in a sunny cleft, slept the sleep of the well-fed. His red shirt was a cheerful beacon on our weary way. We took in the landscape with one slow, comprehensive look, and, waking Cancut suddenly, (who sprang to his feet amazed, and cried “Fire!”) we dashed down the mountain-side.

It was long after noon; we were some dozen of miles from camp; we must speed. No glissade was possible, nor plunge such as travellers make down through the ash-heaps of Vesuvius; but, having once worried through the wretched little spruces, mean counterfeits of trees, we could fling ourselves down from mossy step to step, measuring off the distance by successive leaps of a second each, and alighting, sound after each, on moss yielding as a cushion.

On we hastened, retracing our footsteps of the morning across the avalanches of crumbled granite, through the bogs, along the brooks; undelayed by the beauty of sunny glade or shady dell, never stopping to botanize or to classify, we traversed zone after zone, and safely ran the gantlet of the possible bears on the last level. We found lowland Nature still the same; Ayboljockameegus was flowing still; so was Penobscot; no pirate had made way with the birch; we embarked and paddled to camp.

The first thing, when we touched terra firma, was to look back regretfully toward the mountain. Regret changed to wrath, when we perceived its summit all clear and mistless, smiling warmly to the low summer’s sun. The rascal evidently had only waited until we were out of sight in the woods to throw away his night-cap.

One long rainy day had somewhat disgusted us with the old hemlock-covered camp in the glade of the yellow birch, and we were reasonably and not unreasonably morbid after our disappointment with Katahdin. We resolved to decamp. In the last hour of sunlight, floating pleasantly from lovely reach to reach, and view to view, we could choose a spot of bivouac where no home-scenery would recall any sorry fact of the past. We loved this gentle gliding by the tender light of evening over the shadowy river, marking the rhythm of our musical progress by touches of the paddle. We determined, too, that the balance of bodily forces should be preserved: legs had been well stretched over 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 choir of Bacchantes, soared around the western edge and hung poised above the unillumined forests at the mountain-base; light as air they came and went and faded away, ghostly, after their work of momentary beauty was done. One slight maple, prematurely ripened to crimson and heralding the pomp of autumn, repeated the bright cloud-color amid the vivid verdure of a little island, and its image wavering in the water sent the flame floating nearly to our feet.

Such are the transcendent moments of Nature, unseen and disbelieved by the untaught. The poetic soul lays hold of every such tender pageant of beauty and keeps it forever. Iglesias, having an additional method of preservation, did not fail to pencil rapidly the wondrous scene. When he had finished his dashing sketch of this glory, so transitory, he peppered the whole with cabalistic cipher, which only he could interpret into beauty.

Cancut’s camp-fire now began to overpower the faint glimmers of twilight. The single-minded Cancut, little distracted by emotions, had heaped together logs enough to heat any mansion for a winter. The warmth was welcome, and the great flame, with its bright looks of familiar comradery, and its talk like the complex murmur of a throng, made a fourth in our party by no means terrible, as some other incorporeal visitors might have been. Fire was not only a talker, but an important actor: Fire cooked for us our evening chocolate; Fire held the candlestick, while we, without much ceremony of undressing, disposed ourselves upon our spruce-twig couch; and Fire watched over our slumbers, crouching now as if some stealthy step were approaching, now lifting up its head and peering across the river into some recess where the water gleamed and rustled under dark shadows, and now sending far and wide over the stream and the clearing and into every cleft of the forest a penetrating illumination, a blaze of light, death to all treacherous ambush. So Fire watched while we slept, and when safety came with the earliest gray of morning, it, too, covered itself with ashes and slept.

title: Life in the Open Air/Chapter XIII


text:
Life in the Open Air/Chapter XIV

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful is dawn in the woods. Sweet the first opalescent stir, as if the vanguard sunbeams shivered as they dashed along the chilly reaches of night. And the growth of day, through violet and rose and all its golden glow of promise, is tender and tenderly strong, as the deepening passions of dawning love. Presently up comes the sun very peremptory, and says to people, “Go about your business! Laggards not allowed in Maine! Nothing here to repent of, while you lie in bed and curse to-day because it cannot shake off the burden of yesterday; all clear the past here; all serene the future: into it at once!”
 * Chapter XIV. Homeward.

Birch was ready for us. Objects we travel on, if horses, often stampede or are stampeded; if wagons, they break down; if shanks, they stiffen; if feet, they chafe. No such trouble befalls Birch; leak, however, it will, as ours did this morning. We gently beguiled it into the position taken tearfully by unwhipped little boys, when they are about to receive birch. Then, with a firebrand, the pitch of the seams was easily persuaded to melt and spread a little over the leaky spot, and Birch was sound as a drum.

Staunch and sound Birch needed to be, for presently Penobscot, always a skittish young racer, began to grow lively after he had shaken off the weighty shadow of Katahdin, and, kicking up his heels, went galloping down hill, so furiously that we were at last, after sundry frantic plunges, compelled to get off his back before worse befell us. In the balmy morning we made our first portage through a wood of spruces. How light our firkin was growing! its pork, its hard-tack, and its condiments were diffused among us three, and had passed into muscle. Lake Degetus, as pretty a pocket lake as there is, followed the carry. Next came Lake Ambajeejus, larger, but hardly less lovely. Those who dislike long names may use its shorter Indian title, Umdo. We climbed a granite crag draped with moss long as the beard of a Druid, — a crag on the south side of Ambajeejus, or Umdo. Thence we saw Katahdin, noble as ever, unclouded in the sunny morning, near, and yet enchantingly vague, with the blue sky which surrounded it. It was still an isolate pyramid rising with no effect from the fair blue lakes and the fair green sea of the birch-forest, — a brilliant sea of woods, gay as the shallows of ocean shot through with sunbeams and sunlight reflected upward from golden sands.

We sped along all that exquisite day, best of all our poetic voyage. Sometimes we drifted and basked in sunshine, sometimes we lingered in the birchen shade; we paddled from river to lake, from lake to river again; the rapids whirled us along, surging and leaping under us with magnificent gallop; frequent carries struck in, that we might not lose the forester in the waterman. It was a fresh world that we traversed on our beautiful riverpath, — new as if no other had ever parted its overhanging bowers.

At noon we floated out upon Lake Pemadumcook, the largest bulge of the Penobscot, and irregular as the verb To Be. Lumbermen name it Bammydumcook: Iglesias insisted upon this as the proper reading; and as he was the responsible man of the party, I accepted it. Woods, woody hills, and woody mountains surround Bammydumcook. I have no doubt parts of it are pretty, and will be famous in good time; but we saw little. By the time we were fairly out in the lake and away from the sheltering shore, a black squall to windward, hiding all the West, warned us to fly, for birches swamp in squalls. We deemed that Birch, having brought us through handsomely, deserved a better fate: swamped it must not be. We plied paddle valiantly, and were almost safe behind an arm of the shore when the storm overtook us, and in a moment more, safe, with a canoe only half-full of Bammydumcook water.

It is easy to speak in scoffing tone; but when that great roaring blackness sprang upon us, and the waves, showing their white teeth, snarled around, we were far from being in the mood to scoff. It is impossible to say too much of the charm of this gentle scenery, mingled with the charm of this adventurous sailing. And then there were no mosquitoes, no alligators, no serpents uncomfortably hugging the trees, no miasmas lurking near; and blueberries always. Dust there was none, nor the things that make dust. But Iglesias and I were breathing AIR, — Air sweet, tender, strong, and pure as an ennobling love. It was a day very happy, for Iglesias and I were near what we both love almost best of all the dearly-beloveds. It is such influence as this that rescues the thought and the hand of an artist from enervating mannerism. He cannot be satisfied with vague blotches of paint to convey impressions so distinct and vivid as those he is forced to take direct from a Nature like this. He must be true and powerful.

The storm rolled by and gave us a noble view of Katahdin, beyond a broad, beautiful scope of water, and rising seemingly directly from it. We fled before another squall, over another breadth of Bammydumcook, and made a portage around a great dam below the lake. The world should know that at this dam the reddest, spiciest, biggest, thickest wintergreen-berries in the world are to be found, beautiful as they are good.

Birch had hitherto conducted himself with perfect propriety. I, the novice, had acquired such entire confidence in his stability of character that I treated him with careless ease, and never listened to the warnings of my comrades that he would serve me a trick. Cancut navigated Birch through some white water below the dam, and Birch went curveting proudly and gracefully along, evidently feeling his oats. When Iglesias and I came to embark, I, the novice, perhaps a little intoxicated with wintergreen-berries, stepped jauntily into the laden boat. Birch, alas! failed me. He tilted; he turned; he took in Penobscot, — took it in by the quart, by the gallon, by the barrel; he would have sunk without mercy, had not Iglesias and Cancut succeeded in laying hold of a rock and restoring equilibrium. I could not have believed it of Birch. I was disappointed, and in consternation; and if I had not known how entirely it was Birch’s fault that everybody was ducked and everybody now had a wet blanket, I should have felt personally foolish. I punished myself for another’s fault and my own inexperience by assuming the wet blankets as my share at the next carry. I suppose few of my readers imagine how many pounds of water a blanket can absorb.

After camps at Katahdin any residence in the woods without a stupendous mountain before the door would have been tame. It must have been this, and not any wearying of sylvan life, that made us hasten to reach the outermost log-house at the Millinoket carry before nightfall. The sensation of house and in-door life would be a new one, and so satisfying in itself that we should not demand beautiful objects to meet our first blink of awakening eyes.

An hour before sunset, Cancut steered us toward a beach, and pointed out a vista in the woods, evidently artificial, evidently a road trodden by feet and hoofs, and ruled by parallel wheels. A road is one of the kindliest gifts of brother man to man: if a path in the wilderness, it comes forward like a friendly guide offering experience and proposing a comrade dash deeper into the unknown world; if a highway, it is the great, bold, sweeping character with which civilization writes its autograph upon a continent. Leaving our plunder on the beach, beyond the reach of plunderers, whose great domain we were about to enter, we walked on toward the first house, compelled at parting to believe, that, though we did not love barbarism less, we loved civilization more. In the morning, Cancut should, with an ox-cart, bring Birch and our traps over the three miles of the carry.

title: Life in the Open Air/Chapter XIV


text:
Life in the Open Air/Chapter XV

What could society do without women and children? Both we found at the first house, twenty miles from the second. The children buzzed about us; the mother milked for us one of Maine’s vanguard cows. She baked for us bread, fresh bread, — such bread! not staff of life, — life’s vaulting-pole. She gave us blueberries with cream of cream. Ah, what a change! We sat on chairs, at a table, and ate from plates. There was a table-cloth, a salt-cellar made of glass, of glass never seen at camps near Katahdin. There was a sugar-bowl, a milk-jug, and other paraphernalia of civilization, including — O memories of Joseph Bourgogne! — a dome of baked beans, with a crag of pork projecting from the apex. We partook decorously, with controlled elbows, endeavoring to appear as if we were accustomed to sit at tables and manage plates. The men, women, and children of Millinoket were hospitable and delighted to see strangers, and the men, like all American men in the summer before a Presidential election, wanted to talk politics. Katahdin’s last full-bodied appearance was here; it rises beyond a breadth of black forest, a bulkier mass, but not so symmetrical as from the southern points of view. We slept that night on a feather-bed, and took cold for want of air, beneath a roof.
 * Chapter XV. Out of the Woods.

By the time we had breakfasted, Cancut arrived with Birch on an ox-sledge. Here our well-beloved west branch of the Penobscot, called of yore Norimbagua, is married to the east branch, and of course by marriage loses his identity, by and by, changing from the wild, free, reckless rover of the forest to a tamish family-man style of river, useful to float rafts and turn mills. However, during the first moments of the honeymoon, the happy pair, Mr. Penobscot and Miss Milly Noket, now a unit under the marital name, are gay enough, and glide along bowery reaches and in among fair islands, with infinite endearments and smiles, making the world very sparkling and musical there. By and by they fall to romping, and, to avoid one of their turbulent frolics, Cancut landed us, as he supposed, on the mainland, to lighten the canoe. Just as he was sliding away down-stream, we discovered that he had left us upon an island in the midst of frantic, impassable rapids. “Stop, stop, John Gilpin!” and luckily he did stop, otherwise he would have gone on to tide-water, ever thinking that we were before him, while we, with our forest appetites, would have been glaring hungrily at each other, or perhaps drawing lots for a cannibal doom. Once again, as we were shooting a long rapid, a table-top rock caught us in mid-current. We were wrecked. It was critical. The waves swayed us perilously this way and that. Birch would be full of water, or overturned, in a moment. Small chance for a swimmer in such maelstroms! All this we saw, but had no time to shudder at. Aided by the urgent stream, we carefully and delicately — for a coarse movement would have been death — wormed our boat off the rock, and went fleeting through a labyrinth of new perils, onward, with a wild exhilaration, like galloping through prairie on fire. Of all the high distinctive national pleasures of America, chasing buffalo, stump-speaking, and the like, there is none so intense as shooting rapids in a birch. Whenever I recall our career down the Penobscot, a longing comes over me to repeat it.

We dropped down stream without further adventures. We passed the second house, the first village, and other villages, very white and wide-awake, melodiously named Nickertow, Pattagumpus, and Mattascunk. We spent the first night at Mattawamkeag. We were again elbowed at a tavern table, and compelled to struggle with real and not ideal pioneers for fried beefsteak and soggy doughboys. The last river day was tame, but not tiresome. We paddled stoutly by relays, stopping only once, at the neatest of farm-houses, to lunch on the most airy-substantial bread and baked apples and cream. It is surprising how confidential a traveller always is on the subject of his gastronomic delights. He will have the world know how he enjoyed his dinner, perhaps hoping that the world by sympathy will enjoy its own.

Late in the afternoon of our eighth day from Greenville, Moosehead Lake, we reached the end of birch-navigation, the great mill-dams of Indian Oldtown, near Bangor. Acres of great pine logs, marked three crosses and a dash, were floating here at the boom; we saw what Maine men supposed timber was made for. According to the view acted upon at Oldtown, Senaglecouna has been for a century or centuries training up its lordly pines, that gang-saws, worked by Penobscot, should shriek through their helpless cylinders, gnashing them into boards and chewing them into sawdust.

Poor Birch! how out of its element it looked, hoisted on a freight-car and travelling by rail to Bangor! There we said adieu to Birch and Cancut. Peace and plenteous provender be with him! Journeys make friends or foes; and we remember our fat guide, not as one who from time to time just did not drown us, but as the jolly comrade of eight days crowded with novelty and beauty, and fine, vigorous, manly life.

title: Life in the Open Air/Chapter XV


text: Page:Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia) (1651).djvu/619


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Searight v. Stokes/Dissent McLean

Mr. Justice McLEAN.

I dissent from the opinion of the court. And as the case involves high principles and, to some extent, the action and powers of a sovereign state, I will express my opinion.

This was an amicable action to try whether the defendants, who are contractors for the transportation of the mail on the Cumberland road, are liable, under the laws of Pennsylvania, to pay toll for stages in which the mail of the United States is conveyed.

This road was constructed by the federal government through the state of Pennsylvania, with its consent. Whether this power was thus constitutionally exercised, is an inquiry not necessarily involved in the decision of this case. The road was made, and for some years it was occasionally repaired by appropriations from the treasury of the United States. These appropriations were made with reluctance at all times, and sometimes were defeated. This, as a permanent system of keeping the road in repair, was, of necessity, abandoned; and, with the assent of Pennsylvania, Congress passed a bill to construct toll-gates and impose a tax on those who used the road. This bill was vetoed by the President, on the ground that Congress had no constitutional power to pass it. The plan was then adopted to cede the road, on certain conditions, to the states through which it had been established.

On the 4th of April, 1831, Pennsylvania passed 'An act for the preservation of the Cumberland road.'

By the 1st section it was provided, that as soon as the consent of the government of the United States shall have been obtained, certain commissioners, who were named, were to be appointed, whose duties in regard to the road were specially defined. The 2d section enacted, that to keep so much of the road in repair as lies in the state of Pennsylvania, and pay the expense of collection, &c., the commissioners should cause six toll-gates to be erected, and certain rates of toll were established. To this section there was a proviso, 'that no toll shall be received or collected for the passage of any wagon or carriage laden with the property of the United States, or any cannon or military stores belonging to the United States or to any of the states composing the union.'

By the 4th section the tolls were to be applied, after paying expenses of collection, &c., to the repairs of the road, the commissioners having power to increase them, provided they shall not exceed the rates of toll on the Harrisburg and Pittsburg road. The last section provided that the toll should not be altered below or above a sum necessary to defray the expenses incident to the preservation and repair of said road. &c., and also, 'that no change, alteration, or amendment shall ever be adopted, that will in any wise defeat or affect the true intent and meaning of this act.'

By the 10th section of the above act it was declared to have no effect until Congress should assent to the same, 'and until so much of the said road as passes through the state of Pennsylvania be first put in a good state of repair, and an appropriation made by Congress for erecting toll-houses and toll-gates thereon, to be expended under the authority of the commissioners appointed by this act.'

By their act of the 24th of June, 1834, Congress appropriated $300,000 to repair the Cumberland road east of the Ohio river, which referred to the above act of Pennsylvania, and also to similar acts passed by Virginia and Maryland. And in the 4th section of the act it was provided, 'that as soon as the sum by this act appropriated, or so much thereof as is necessary, shall be expended in the repair of said road agreeably to the provisions of this act, the same shall be surrendered to the states respectively through which said road passes; and the United States shall not thereafter be subject to any expense for repairing said road.' This surrender of the road was accepted by Pennsylvania, by an act of the 1st of April, 1835.

The above acts constitute the compact between the state of Pennsylvania and the union, in regard to the surrender of this road. The nature and extent of this compact are now to be considered.

As before remarked, the constitutional power of Congress to construct this road is not necessarily involved in this decision. By the act of Congree of the 30th of April, 1802, to authorize the people of Ohio to 'form a constitution and state government,' among other propositions for the acceptance of the state, it was proposed that 'five per cent. of the net proceeds of the lands lying within the said state, sold by Congress, should be applied to the laying out and making public roads leading from the navigable waters falling into the Atlantic, to the Ohio, to the said state, and through the same; such roads to be laid under the authority of Congress, with the consent of the several states through which the roads shall pass: provided the state shall agree not to tax land sold by the government until after the expiration of five years from the time of such sale.'

By the 2d section of the act of the 3d March, 1803, three per cent. of the above fund was placed at the disposition of the state, to be 'applied to the laying out, opening, and making roads, within the state.'

The above conditions, having been accepted by Ohio, constituted the compact under which the Cumberland road was laid out and constructed by the authority of Congress. And of this work it may be said, however great has been the expenditure through the inexperience or unfaithfulness of publie agents, that no public work has been so diffusive in its benefits to the country. It opened a new avenue of commerce between the eastern and western states. Since its completion, and while it was kept in repair, the annual transportation of goods and travel on it saved an expense equal to no inconsiderable part of the cost of the road. But its cession to the states through which it was established was found necessary to raise, by tolls, an annual revenue for its repair.

Whatever expenditure was incurred in the construction of this road beyond the two per cent. reserved by the compact with Ohio, was amply repaid by the beneficial results of the work; and this was the main object of Congress. It was a munificent object, and worthy of the legislature of a great nation.

The road was surrendered to Pennsylvania and the other states through which it had been constructed. But what was ceded to Pennsylvania? All the right of the United States which was not reserved by the compact of cession. This right may be supposed to arise from the compact with Ohio; the consent of Pennsylvania to the construction of the road, and the expense of its construction, including the sums paid to individuals for the right of way. These, and whatever jurisdiction over the road, if any, might be exercised by the United States, were surrendered to Pennsylvania. The road then must be considered as much within the jurisdiction and control of Pennsylvania, excepting the rights reserved in the compact, as if it had been constructed by the funds of that state. It is, therefore, important to ascertain the extent of the rights reserved by the United States.

In the closing paragraph of the 2d section of the act of 1831, above cited, it is provided, 'that no toll shall be received or collected for the passage of any wagon or carriage laden with the property of the United States, or any cannon or military stores belonging to the United States, or to any of the states composing this union.' In addition to this, there were certain limitations imposed, as to the amount of tolls, on the state of Pennsylvania, which need not now be considered.

Some light may be cast on the import of the above reservation by a reference to somewhat similar compacts made in regard to the same subject between the United States and the states of Ohio, Maryland, and Virginia. The Ohio act of the 2d of March, 1831, provides, in the 4th section, 'that no toll shall be received or collected for the passage of any stage or coach conveying the United States mail, or horses bearing the same, or any wagon or carriage laden with the property of the United States, or any cavalry or other troops, arms, or military stores, belonging to the same, or to any of the states comprising this union, or any person or persons on duty in the military service of the United States, or of the militia of any of the states.' The 4th section of the Maryland act of the 23d of January, 1832, provided, 'that no tolls shall be received or collected for the passage of any wagon or carriage laden with the property of the United States, or any cannon or military stores belonging to the United States, or to any of the states composing this union.' In the Virginia act of the 7th of February, 1832, it is provided, 'that no toll shall be received or collected for the passage of any stage or coach conveying the United States mail, or horses bearing the same, or any wagon or carriage laden with property of the United States, or any cavalry or other troops, army of military stores, belonging to the same, or to any of the states comprising this union, or any person or persons on duty in the military service of the United States, or of the militia of any of the states.'

The reservations in the Pennsylvania and Maryland acts are the same, and differ materially from those contained in the acts of Ohio and Virginia. In the latter acts the mail-stage is excepted, but not in the former. Pennsylvania and Maryland exempt from toll 'any wagon or earriage laden with the property of the United States;' but the same exemption is contained in the Ohio and Virginia laws in addition to that of the mail-stage. Now, can the reservations in these respective acts be construed to mean the same thing? Is there no difference between the acts of Ohio and Pennsylvania? Their language is different, and must not their meaning be sought from the words in the respective acts? They are separate and distinct compacts. The Ohio law was first enacted, and was, probably, before the legislature of Pennsylvania when their act was passed. But whether this be the fact or not, they were both sanctioned by Congress; and the question is, whether both compacts are substantially the same? That the legislatures did not mean the same thing seems to me to be clear of all doubt. Did Congress, in acceding to these acts, consider that they were of the same import? Such a presumption cannot be sustained without doing violence to the language of the respective acts.

In both acts wagons laden with the property of the United States are exempted. In the Ohio act the mail-stage is exempted from toll, but not in the act of Pennsylvania. Now, is the mail-stage exempted from toll by both acts or by neither? Is not either of these positions equally unsustain able? The exemption of the mail-stage must be struck out of the Ohio law to sustain one of these positions, and to sustain the other it must be inserted in the act of Pennsylvania. Does not the only difference consist in striking out in the one case and inserting in the other? This must be admitted unless the words, 'wagon or carriage laden with the property of the United States,' mean one thing in the Ohio law, and quite a different thing in the law of Pennsylvania. These words have a sensible and obvious application in both acts, without including the mail-stage. In the Ohio law the words 'no toll shall be received or collected for the passage of any stage or coach conveying the United States mail,' cannot, by any sound construction, be considered as surplusage; and yet they must to so considered if the Pennsylvania act exempt the mail-stage.

When one speaks of transporting the property of the United States, the meaning of the terms 'property of the United States,' is never mistaken. They mean munitions of war, provisions purchased for the support of the army, and any other property purchased for the publie revenue. They do not mean the mail of the United States. A wagon laden with property is understood to be a wagon used for the transportation of property, in the ordinary sense of such terms. A wagon or carriage being laden is understood to have a full or usual load. The mail-stage of the United States is never spoken of in this sense. It is used for the transportation of passengers as well as the mail, and in this view it is undoubtedly considered when spoken of in conversation, and especially when referred to in a legislative act. In no sense can the mail-stage be considered a 'carriage laden with the property of the United States.' The same exception applies to a wagon or carriage laden with the property of a state. Now no one can doubt the meaning of the exception thus applied. And can a different meaning be given to the same words when applied to the United States? Certainly not, unless the mail can be denominated the property of the United States.

The mail of the United States is not the property of the United States. What constitutes the mail? Not the leathern bag, but its contents. A stage load of mail-bags could not be called the mail. They might be denominated the property of the United States, but not the mail. The mail consists of packets of letters made up with post-bills, and directed to certain post-offices for distribution or delivery; and whether these be conveyed in a bag or out of it, they are equally the mail; but no bag without them is or can be called the mail. Can these packets be said to be the property of the United States? The letters and their contents belong to individuals. No officer in the government can abstract a letter form the mail, not directed to him, whithout incurring the penalty of the law. And can these letters or mailed pamphlets or newspapers be called the property of the United States? They in no sense belong to the United States, and are never so denominated. If a letter be stolen from the mail which contains a bank-note, the property in the note is laid in the person who wrote the letter in which the note is enclosed. From these views I am brought to the conclusion that neither party to the compact under consideration could have understood 'a wagon or carriage laden with the property of the United States,' as including the mail-stage of the United States.

Are there any considerations connected with this subject which lead to a different conclusion from that stated. The fact that four distinct compacts were entered into with four states to keep this road in repair, cannot have this effect. We must judge of the intention of the parties to the compact by their language. I know of no other rule of construction. Two of these compacts exempt the mail-stage from toll, and two of them do not exempt it. Now, if the same construction, in this respect, must be given to all of them, which of the alternatives shall be adopted? Shall the mail-stage be exempted by all of them, or not exempted by any of them?

What effect can the expenditures of the United States, in the construction of this road, have upon this question? In my judgment, none whatever. The reservation must be construed by its terms, and not by looking behind it. The federal government has been amply repaid for the expenditures in the construction of this road, great and wasteful as they may have been, by the resulting benefits to the nation. It is now the road of Pennsylvania, subject only to the terms of the compact. In the act surrendering this road to the states respectively, through which it passes, Congress say, 'and the United States shall not thereafter be subject to any expense for repairing said road.' To get clear of this expense was the object of the cession of it to the states. But does this affect the question under consideration? The repairs of the road are provided for, by the tolls which the state of Pennsylvania is authorized to impose. And this is the meaning of the above provision. It is supposed, that the exaction of toll on the mail-stage would conflict with that provision. But how does it conflict with it? The toll on the mail-stage is not paid by the government, but by the contractor. And whether this toll will increase the price paid by the government for the transportation of the mail, is a matter that cannot be determined. Competition is invited and bids are made for this service, and the price to be paid depends upon contingent circumstances. The toll would be paid, in part, if not in whole, by a small increase of price for the transportation of passengers. The profits of the contractor might, perhaps, be some-what lessened by the toll, or it might increase, somewhat, the cost of conveying the mail. But this is indirect and contingent; so that in no sense can it be considered as repugnant to the above provision. 'The United States are not to be subject to any expense for repairing this road;' and they are not, in the sense of the law, should the Post-office Department have to pay, under the contingencies named, a part of the toll stated. Whether it does pay it or not, under future contracts, cannot be known; and whatever expense it may pay, will be for the use, and not the repair, of the road.

The act of the 13th of June, 1836, which is supposed to be in violation of the compact, I will now consider. That act provides, 'That all wagons, carriages, or other modes of conveyance, passing upon that part of the Cumberland road which passes through Pennsylvania, carrying goods, cannon, or military stores belonging to the United States, or to any individual state of the union, which are excepted from the payment of toll by the second section of an act passed the 4th of April, 1831, shall extend only so far as to relieve such wagons, carriages, and other modes of conveyance, from the payment of toll to the proportional amount of such goods so carried belonging to the United States, or to any of the individual states of the union; and that in all cases of wagons, carriages, stages, or other modes of conveyance, carrying the United States mail, with passengers or goods, such wagon, stage, or other mode of conveyance, shall pay half-toll upon such modes of conveyance.'

By the act of 1831, 'every chariot, coach, coachee, stage, wagon, phaeton, or chaise, with two horses and four wheels, were to be charged at each gate twelve cents; for either of the carriages last mentioned, with four horses, eithteen cents.' Is the act of 1836, which imposes half-toll on 'the mail-stage, with passengers or goods,' repugnant to the above provision? I think it is not, in any respect.

If the mail be not the property of the United States, then the stage in which it is conveyed is not within the exception of the act of 1831, and it is liable to pay toll. That only which is within the exception is exempted. That the mail is in no sense the property of the United States, and was not so understood by the parties to the compact, has already been shown. It follows, therefore, that a law of Pennsylvania. imposing on such stage a half or full rate of toll, is no violation of the compact.

But, if the mail-stage were placed on a footing with a wagon or carriage laden with the property of the United States, is the act of 1836, requiring it to pay toll, a violation of the compact? I think it is not. A wagon or carriage laden with the property of the United States, means a wagon or carriage having, as before remarked, a full or usual load. Such a vehicle is exempted from toll by the act of 1831. But suppose such wagon or carriage should have half its load of the property of the United States, and the other half of the property of individuals, for which the ordinary price for transportation was paid; is such a wagon, thus laden, exempted from toll? Surely it is not. An exemption under such circumstances would be a fraud upon the compact. It should be required to pay half-toll, and this is what the law of Pennsylvania requires. The mail-stage by that law is only half-toll, when it conveys passengers with the mail. There is, then, no legal objection to the exaction of this toll. It is in every point of view just, and within the spirit of the compact.

In the argument for the United States, the broad ground was assumed, that no state had the power to impose a toll on a stage used for the transportation of the mail. That it is a means of the federal government to carry into effect its constitutional powers, and, consequently, is not a subject of state taxation. To sustain this position the cases of McCulloch v. The State of Maryland, 4 Wheat., 316, and Dobbins v. The Commissioners of Erie County, 16 Pet., 435, were cited.

In the first case, this court held, 'that a state government had no right to tax any of the constitutional means employed by the government of the union, to execute its constitutional powers.' And the Bank of the United States was held to be a means of the government. In the second case, under a general law of Pennsylvania imposing a tax on all officers, a tax was assessed on the office held by the plaintiff, as captain of a revenue-cutter of the United States, and this court held that such law, so far as it affected such an officer, was unconstitutional and void. The court say, 'there is a concurrent right of legislation in the states and the United States, except as both are restrained by the Constitution of the United States. Both are restrained by express prohibitions in the Constitution; and the states by such as are reciprocally implied when the exercise of a right by a state conflicts with the perfect execution of another sovereign power delegated to the United States. That occurs when taxation by a state acts upon the instruments and emoluments and persons which the United States may use and employ as necessary and proper means to execute their sovereign power.'

Neither of these cases reach or affect the principle involved in the case under consideration. The officer of the United States was considered as a means or instrument of the government, and, therefore, could not be taxed by the state as an officer. To make that case the same in principle as the one before us, the officer must claim exemption from toll as a means of the government, in passing over a toll-bridge or turnpike-road constructed by a state, or by an association of individuals under a state law. The principle of the other case is equally inapplicable. Maryland taxed the franchise of the Bank of the United States, and if the law establishing that bank were constitutional, the franchise was no more liable to taxation by a state than rights and privileges conferred on one or more individuals, under any law of the union. With the same propriety a judge of the United States might be subjected to a tax by a state for the exercise of his judicial functions. And so of every other officer and public agent. But the court held that the stock in the bank owned by a citizen might be taxed.

A toll exacted for the passage over a bridge or on a turnpike-road is not, strictly speaking, a tax. It is a compensation for a benefit conferred. Money has been expended in the construction of the road or bridge, which adds greatly to the comforts and facilities of traveling, and on this ground compensation is demanded. Now, can the United States claim the right to use such road or bridge free from toll? Can they place locomotives on the railroads of the states or of companies, and use them by virtue of their sovereignty? Such acts would appropriate private property for public purposes, with-out compensation; and this the Constitution of the union prohibits.

It is said, in the argument, that as well might a revenuecutter be taxed by a state as to impose a toll on the stage which conveys the mail. The revenue-cutter plies on the thoroughfare of nations or of the state, which is open to all vessels. But the stage passes over an artificial structure of great expense, which is only common to all who pay for its use a reasonable compensation. There can be no difficulty on this point. At no time, it is believed, has the Post-office Department asserted the right to use the turnpike-roads of a state, in the transmission of the mail, free from toll.

Pennsylvania stands pledged to keep the road in repair, by the use of the means stipulated in the compact. And she has bound herself, 'that no change, alteration, or amendment shall ever be adopted that will in any wise defeat or affect the true intent and meaning of the act of 1831.' In my judgment, that state has in no respect violated the compact by the act of 1836. If the mail-stage can be included in the exemption by the terms, 'wagon or carriage laden with the property of the United States,' still the half-toll on such stage, when it contains passengers, is within the compact. But, as has been shown, the mail-stage is not included in the exemption, and, consequently, it was liable to be charged with full toll. The state, therefore, instead of exceeding its powers under the compact, has not yet exercised them to the extent which the act of 1831 authorizes.

title: Searight v. Stokes/Dissent McLean