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.