The Penobscot drains an immense territory covered with pine, spruce and hemlock forests. Two hundred millions of feet of lumber will be floated down it in a single season. Its bold western bay shore rises into the Camden Mountains, and both sides of the bay were embraced for thirty miles in the Muscongus Patent, a grant of King George I. which came to the colonial Governor Samuel Waldo, of Massachusetts, and afterwards, by descent through his wife, to General Henry Knox. Thus Knox became the Patroon of Penobscot Bay, building a palace at Thomaston, where he lived in baronial state and spent so much money in princely hospitality that he bankrupted himself and almost ruined his Revolutionary compatriot, General Lincoln, who became involved with him. On this western shore, Rockland, with nine thousand people, is a town of sea-captains, fishermen and lime-burners, its rocks making the best lime of the district, and a hundred kilns illuminating the hills at night. Adjacent are Dix Island, and to the southward Vinalhaven Island, producing fine granites shipped abroad for building. To the northward is Camden, under the shadow of Mount Megunticook, its two peaks rising fourteen hundred feet above the harbor. Out in front is an archipelago of pretty islands, the chief being "the insular town of Islesboro," stretching about thirteen miles along the centre of Penobscot Bay, its ten square miles of irregular contour having of late developed into a region of cottages built in all the pleasant places and making a very popular resort. To the northeastward the massive Blue Hill stands up an isolated guardian behind the peninsula of Castine, where the attractive white houses are spread over the broad and sloping point enclosing its deep harbor, and its church-spire rises sharply among the trees. In the eastern archipelago of Penobscot Bay are the Fox Island group of about one hundred and fifty islands, and the larger islands of North Haven and Vinalhaven are to the southward, beyond which are the shores of Cape Rosier, making the eastern border of the bay, while through a vista looms up the distant Isle au Haut, an outer guardian upon the ocean's edge. At the eastern horizon behind the cape rise the hazy, bisected, round-topped peaks of Mount Desert, thirty miles away.