By this time some reader is saying, “I don’t care anything about the moose, and less about the fishing. Didn’t you go anywhere? Didn’t you see anything worth writing about?” The rebuke is deserved, and the writer hastens to say that Moosehead Lake is forty miles long and fifteen miles across in the widest part, having an estimated shoreline of something like 400 miles. We saw it all, from Greenville to Southeast Carry; but he would be a brave man or a rash one, who would undertake to put its beauty into words. We drove to Roach River and, from the neighbouring hilltop, looked down upon the sparkling waters of Roach Pond and away across miles of forest to mighty Katahdin. We followed the old lumber roads into the depths of the wood, where the silence is broken only by the chatter of the red squirrel or the harsh cry of the bluejay. In the cool evenings we sat around the wood fire that crackled and leaped in the great open fireplace in the House of Rest, and heard the guides tell stories which would have made Baron Munchausen turn green with envy. We even went to Mountain Pond, six miles away, and all the way up hill. No wagon could make that trip and survive. The lazy man had a chronic dislike to walking six miles up hill on a hot August day, and, in a moment of forgetfulness, accepted the loan of a friend’s horse. He had not been on a horse in fifteen years and had forgotten the eccentric motions which that animal makes in scrambling over rocks and corduroy roads. However, he lived to reach Mountain Pond, and spent the night with three friends in an “A” tent. Don’t ask about the fishing, for it is a subject upon which the writer does not care to dwell. The wind blew a gale every hour of the day spent on Mountain Pond, and you can safely write the sign of equation between the results of that day’s toil and those secured by Peter and his companions engaged in a similar enterprise. That was a never-to-be-forgotten night. The wind roared incessantly among the trees, the tent shook and flapped, an obtrusive root insisted upon being familiar with our ribs, and, to complete the enjoyment, a hedge-hog made us a call. That call afforded the one bit of comfort in an otherwise dreary night. To see the artist, in scanty attire, chasing that hedge-hog around the camp-fire at two o’clock in the morning was a sight to warm the cockles of the heart. To the artistic temperament there was nothing attractive in slaughter, but if the well-armed marauder could be caught alive and taken down to the hotel, that would be worth while. Finally, a well-aimed blow stunned the animal and he was hastily thrust under an empty box with a sufficient number of stones piled upon it to prevent it from being overturned by any exertion on the part of the captive. When daylight came, the box was in its place, but the hedge-hog had gnawed his way to liberty. That we did not extract his teeth before imprisoning him was a fatal oversight. [Illustration: 0151] [Illustration: 0152]