Here is that fairy ship of the wilderness, the birch-bark canoe, the first craft of America, antedating even the arrival of the white man. It is the ship of risk and of adventure, belonging by right to him who goes far and travels light, who is careless of his home coming. It is a boat that now carries the voyager, and now is carried by him. It is a great-hearted craft. You shall take it upon your shoulders, and carry it a mile across the land trail, without needing to set it down; but when you place it on the water it in turn will carry you and your fellow, and yet another, and your household goods of the wilderness up to five times your weight. Freakish as a woman, as easily unsettled, yet if you be master it shall take you over combing waves, and down yeasty rapids and against steady current, until finally you shall find yourself utterly apart from the familiar haunts of man, about you only the wilderness, the unadventured. This is the ship of the wilderness, the fairy ship, the ship of heroes. To-day it is passing away. With it goes great store of romance and adventure. The red man taught the white man how to build and how to use this boat. He taught how to cut the long strips of toughest bark from the birch-tree, prying it off with sharpened pole or driven wooden wedge. He showed how to build the frame of the boat on the ground, or in a long hole dug in the ground, where stakes hold fast the curves of the gunwales, between which are later forced the steamed splints that serve as ribs and as protection for the fragile skin, soaked soft and pliable, which is presently laid on the frame of gunwale and rib and bottom splint. This covering of bark is sewn together with the thread of the forest, fiber of swamp conifers—“wautp,” the Indians of the North call this thread. Then over the seams is run the melted pitch and resin taken from the woods. The edges of the bark skin are made fast at the gunwales, the sharply bent bows are guarded carefully from cracks where the straining comes, and the narrow thwarts, wide as your three fingers, are lashed in, serving as brace and as all the seat you shall find when weary from kneeling. The fresh bark is clean and sweet upon the new-made ship, the smell of the resin is clean. Each line of the boat is full of spirit and grace and beauty.