Its importance may be estimated, also, from the vast amount of employment it furnishes and the revenue it produces. Its history is full of interest from the hour it leaves the stump in the forest, through the various processes it passes until taken from the hold of the ship and piled away upon our market piers. The amount of employment it furnishes to lumbermen, mill-men, rafters, coasters, truckmen, merchants, and mechanics, exceeds that furnished by any other single product in Maine or the province of New Brunswick. On the Penobscot alone there are said to be ten thousand men engaged in lumbering. CHAPTER II. The Pine twenty-five Years ago.--Its rapid Disappearance.--Explorations. --Outfit.--Up-river Journeying.--Its Distance.--Mode of Nightly Encampment.--Cooking.--Disturbed Slumbers.--Ludicrous Fright.--Deer. --Encounter with Bears.--Mode of Exploring.--Forest Observatory.-- Climbing Trees.--The Emotions excited by the View.--Necessity of Compass.--Nature's Compass.--The Return.--Annoyances from mischievous Bears.--Stumpage.--Permits.--Outfit and Return.--Crossing Carrying-places.--A Strong Man.--Skill of Boatmen.--Item of personal Experience.--Blind Path.--A Family in the Wilderness.--Things to be considered in locating Camps. Allusion has been made to the peculiarity of the Pine-tree in associating together in clusters or families. It is now a rare thing to find a sufficient quantity of timber in one of those clusters to meet the demands of a team during the usual period of hauling, which is about three months. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, large tracts of country were covered principally with Pine-trees. Those tracks seemed purposely located in the vicinity of lakes, large streams, and rivers; a winter's work could then be made contiguous to improved portions of the country, which rendered little previous exploration necessary. But the woodman's ax, together with the destructive fires which have swept over large districts from time to time, have, so to speak, driven this tree far back into the interior wilderness. In fact, the Pine seems doomed, by the avarice and enterprise of the white man, gradually to disappear from the borders of civilization, as have the Aborigines of this country before the onward march of the Saxon race.