The cranberry is indigenous to the whole extent of the Maine sea-board. It grows to perfection on the borders of wet meadows, but I have known it to thrive on the upland. The culture has been found very remunerative in localities less favored by nature, as at Cape Cod and on the New Jersey coast. Some attempts at cranberry culture have recently been made with good success at Lemoine, on the main-land, opposite Mount Desert. Blue-berries are abundant on Mount Desert. I saw one young girl who had picked enough in a week to bring her seven dollars. Formerly they were sent off the island, but they are now in good demand at the hotels and boarding-houses. In poorer families the head of it picks up a little money by shore-fishing. He plants a little patch with potatoes, dressing the land with sea-weed, which costs him only the labor of gathering it. His fire-wood is as cheaply procured from the neighboring forest or shore, and in the autumn his wife and children gather berries, which are exchanged for necessaries at the stores. At the extreme southerly end of Mount Desert is Bass Harbor, with three islands outlying. It is landlocked, and a well-known haven of refuge. FOOTNOTES: [12] "Champlain's Voyages," edit. 1613. Mount Desert was also made out by the Boston colonists of 1630. The reader is referred for materials of Mount Desert's history to Champlain, Charlevoix, Lescarbot, Biard, and Purchas, vol. iv. [13] She was one of the queen's ladies of honor, and wife of the Duke of Rochefoucauld Liancourt. [14] Champlain: Mr. Shea says he was only a lay brother. [15] This has a resemblance to Kenduskeag, and was probably the present Bangor. [16] Charlevoix says the landing was on the north side of the island. [17] "History of Maine," vol. i., p. 80. [Illustration: PROFESSOR AGASSIZ.] CHAPTER III. CHRISTMAS ON MOUNT DESERT. "You should have seen that long hill-range, With gaps of brightness riven-- How through each pass and hollow streamed The purpling light of heaven--" WHITTIER. Having broken the ice a little with the reader, I shall suppose him present on the most glorious Christmas morning a New England sun ever shone upon. "A green Christmas makes a fat church-yard," says an Old-country proverb; this was a white _Noël_, cloudless and bright. I saw that the peruke of my neighbor across the Sound, Sargent's Mountain, had been freshly powdered during the night; that the rigging of the ice-bound craft harbored between us was incased in solid ice, reflecting the sunbeams like burnished steel. The inscription on mine host's sign-board was blotted out by the driving sleet; the brown and leafless trees stood transfigured into objects of wondrous beauty. I heard the jingle of bells in the stable-yard and the stamping of feet below stairs, and then "I heard nae mair, for Chanticleer Shook off the pouthery snaw, And hail'd the morning with a cheer, A cottage-rousing craw."