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are mail-carriers on some of the forest streams. One such mail-carrier paddles his canoe twenty miles from Moosehead Lake to Lake Chesuncook, where there are two tiny settlements. The journey takes him all day, and he returns the next day. At each of the Chesuncook settlements is a school-house, and the teachers come in canoes from the world outside.

Hunters, fishermen, and other pleasure-seekers often make long trips on the streams and lakes for days

A deer on the forest borders

and weeks at a
time. A guide
and two persons
can travel com-
fortably in a
canoe and carry
a tent, food, and
the necessary
utensils.

camp
These trips are

not without a
spice of danger,
for there are

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rocky rapids to run, and wide lakes to cross where the waves sometimes threaten to engulf the frail

canoe.

Many deer and moose and a few caribou inhabit the wild lands. These animals are protected by law most of the year, but, during the open season in the fall when shooting is allowed, thousands of sportsmen flock from

the cities near and far to stay a few days or perhaps a few weeks at camps beside remote lakes and streams. They come partly to enjoy the crisp air and the beauty of the woodlands and the rough and ready life of the wilderness, but chiefly for the excitement of hunting big game..

Scarcely less well known than Moosehead Lake are the Rangeley Lakes, nestling among forested hills in

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the northwest corner of the state. They are called a fisherman's paradise. There are five of them, all connected by navigable waterways, and small steamers ply on them and call at the various camps.

[graphic]

A

Mending a sail, Mount Desert

The Coast with a Hundred Harbors

FTER the English became masters of Canada, and

French and Indian raiders from the north were no longer to be feared, the tide of immigration from the older settlements of New England set strongly eastward. In the summers of 1760 and 1761 hundreds of

men were hastening to Maine in every kind of craft that would float. The new free lands were an irresistible bait, the forests promised inexhaustible supplies of timber, the swift streams gave power for grist and sawmills, and the waters teemed with fish. As a rule only the men went the first season, and after choosing sites for their habitations and making clearings they sailed for their old homes. But the next spring they returned with their families. Usually two or three families made the voyage together and lived in the vessel until the log houses were built. It was this hardy race of settlers that founded all the shore towns east of Penobscot Bay.

This entire coast and that in the other direction as far as Portland is a labyrinth of headlands, bays, and isles. The shore-line is so jagged it resembles the teeth of a saw, and there are so many sheltered bays and inlets that Maine is sometimes called "The State of One Hundred Harbors." However, from Casco Bay south the coast is indented comparatively little, and the sandy beaches of Old Orchard, York, and other towns along the shore are well-known summer resorts. The irregularity of Maine's coast-line as a whole is such that it is nearly twenty-five hundred miles long.

Many lighthouses are needed to warn ships away from the reefs and rocky islands. All the New England coast is dotted with them, some tall, some short, some on craggy islets, some on outjutting cliffs or high

banks, some rising out of the sea. For the effective service of the lighthouses we are greatly indebted to a native of France named Fresnel. As a boy he disliked learning from books, and when he was eight years old he did not know his letters. But he was very fond of making experiments, and this induced his parents to send him from the small town where they lived to a special school in Paris. There he worked very earnestly and at length became an engineer, and invented a way to cause the light in a lighthouse to be seen a long distance. He improved the lamp, and he enclosed the light with a sort of glass barrel of many lenses

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so arranged that all the light rays would go forth to illumine the sea, and not skyward or toward the ground

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