canoe was twelve feet long. Three trees besides the birch contributed to its making. The white cedar furnished ribs and lining, the spruce fibrous roots to sew its joints and bind its frame, and from the pine was obtained pitch to stop its seams and cracks.

The forest visitor records that one day while tramping they were overtaken by a shower, and the guide quickly stripped large sheets of bark from a near tree to serve for umbrellas. When they moved on after the shower, the visitor wrapped his bark about him like an apron to shield his clothes from the wet bushes.

There are many mills along the little streams that come from the wooded uplands in various parts of the state. These mills convert both hard and soft wood into such articles as furniture, sleds, tool handles, toys, clothespins, and toothpicks. Much fine white birch wood grows in some sections, and thousands of cords of it are used yearly for spools. It is first sawed into square strips and left in piles to dry. Later the strips are fed into automatic machines which quickly turn them into spools of the required size.

One important use of the forests is to prevent the rapid running off of water. The roots and spongy leaf mould and the shade all help to hold the moisture. Where the forest has been carelessly destroyed by lumbermen or laid waste by fire, the water from storms and melting snow quickly escapes to the streams, and sudden floods are a result, while in dry times the water in the streams is very low. This entails danger to

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crops and dwellings along the banks of the streams, and uncertain water-power for the mills. Thus it is essential to conserve the forests at the headwaters of our rivers, and the government is buying large areas of such woodland, in part for this purpose, and in part to ensure a future supply of lumber.

In the hardwood forests, which are leafless in winter, spring is the time for fires, for after the snow is

gone the sun shines through the bare branches and makes last year's leaves as dry as tinder. A lighted match or cigar stub heedlessly dropped is all that is needed to start a fire that may do enormous damage. The fire spreads very rapidly if a high wind is blowing, and the men who attempt to put it out often have a difficult task. They may have to fight it day and night for a week or more.

The ground in the evergreen woodlands continues moist all through the spring, and they suffer most from fires in a summer drought. There may be many fires burning at the same time, and the air will be hazy with smoke over great stretches of country. Something like a hundred years is required for large forest trees to grow, and when a fire makes a clean sweep killing all the trees in its path, the loss is a very serious one.

Perhaps the greatest of Maine's forest fires occurred in 1762. There was a long drought in the spring, and the tree foliage in June was shrivelled and blighted for lack of moisture. The next month a fire started in the New Hampshire woods and swept eastward across York and Cumberland counties to the sea. Not until copious rains fell late in August were the flames checked in their devastating course.

Maine contains more than eighteen hundred lakes and ponds. All these, together with the rivers, have a surface amounting to fully one-tenth of the land area of the state. Most of the lakes and ponds have wooded surroundings. The largest lake is Moosehead. It is forty miles long and from four to twelve broad. From its borders Mount Kineo rises eight hundred feet above the lake level. The mountain faces the water in so perpendicular a precipice that a person could jump into the lake from its top. This is the largest mass of hornstone known in the world, and the New England Indians got from it much of the flint they used for their arrow-heads.

The solitudes around Moosehead are frequented by big game, the streams are full of fish, and the lakes abound with water-fowl. Here and there a few faint trails wind through the forest, most of them of little

use except in winter; and the rivers and lakes are the chief thoroughfares, just as they were in the days of the first explorers. Even the Indians are not altogether lacking, for a remnant of the once powerful Penobscot tribe has survived, and some of its members continue to resort to the woods to hunt and fish and act as guides.

The four hundred persons who constitute this Indian tribe have permanent dwellings on the outskirts of the wilderness at Oldtown, where they occupy an

island in the river. A lumberman's bateau rowed by a swarthy Indian gives access to the island. Among the dwellings, which are set helter-skelter in a somewhat close group at one end of the island, are a public hall, a school-house, and a good-sized church. There are no streets nor roads only paths.

The tribe owns considerable land which the state looks after, and from which there is an annual income of about twenty dollars for each individual. Occasionally a young islander goes to college, and some of them have won fame playing ball in the national leagues.

The levels of many of the wilderness lakes vary only a few feet, and boatmen, by short portages, or by none at all, pass easily from one to another. There