Maine's rivers must have birch canoes; Maine's woods, of course, therefore, provide birches. The white-birch, paper-birch, canoe-birch, grows large in moist spots near the stream where it is needed. Seen by the flicker of a campfire at night, they surround the intrusive traveller like ghosts of giant sentinels. Once, Indian tribes with names that "nobody can speak and nobody can spell" roamed these forests. A stouter second growth of humanity has ousted them, save a few seedy ones who gad about the land, and centre at Oldtown, their village near Bangor. These aborigines are the birch-builders. They detect by the river-side the tree barked with material for canoes. They strip it, and fashion an artistic vessel, which civilization cannot better. Launched in the fairy lightness of this, and speeding over foamy waters between forest-solitudes, one discovers, as if he were the first to know it, the truest poetry of pioneer-life. Such poetry Iglesias had sung to me, until my life seemed incomplete while I did not know the sentiment by touch, description, even from the most impassioned witness, addressed to the most imaginative hearer, is feeble. We both wanted to be in a birch: Iglesias, because he knew the fresh, inspiring vivacity of such a voyage; I, because I divined it. We both needed to be somewhere near the heart of New England's wildest wilderness. We needed to see Katahdin,--the distinctest mountain to be found on this side of the continent. Katahdin was known to Iglesias. He had scuffled up its eastern land-slides with a squad of lumbermen. He had birched it down to Lake Chesuncook in by-gone summers, to see Katahdin distant. Now, in a birch we would slide down the Penobscot, along its line of lakes, camp at Katahdin, climb it, and speed down the river to tide-water. That was the great object of all our voyage with its educating preludes,--Katahdin and a breathless dash down the Penobscot. And while we flashed along the gleam of the river, Iglesias fancied he might see the visible, and hear the musical, and be stirred by the beautiful. These, truly, are not far from the daily life of any seer, listener, and perceiver; but there, perhaps, up in the strong wilderness, we might be recreated to a more sensitive vitality. The Antaean treatment is needful for terrestrials, unless they would dwindle. The diviner the power in any artist-soul, the more distinctly is he commanded to get near the divine without him. Fancies pale, that are not fed on facts. It is very easy for any man to be a plagiarist from himself, and present his own reminiscences half disguised, instead of new discoveries. Now, up by Katahdin, there were new discoveries to be made; and that mountain would sternly eye us, to know whether Iglesias were a copyist, or I a Cockney. Katahdin was always in its place up in the woods. The Penobscot was always buzzing along toward the calm reaches, where it takes the shadow of the mountain. All we needed was the birch.