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?