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Show A HOLIDAY IN A VACATION and short blue skirt, followed by an enormous and ad ID.l r.i Dg guide , and cauo" ht big fish everywhere) offered to lend us anything in her outfit, from a pack-basket to a d arm.n g-need ie · It was cheerful to meet with such general encouragement in our small ad- venture. B ut the trouble was to decide which way to go. NicatOus lies near the top of a watershed about a thousan d f ee t hI.g h . From the region round about it at least seven canoeable rivers descend to civiliza- b.o n. The Narraguagus and the Union on the south, the Passadumkeag on the west, the Sisladobsis and the St. Croix on the north, and the two branches of the Machias or Kowahshiscook on the east; to say noth m. g o f the Westogus and the Hackmatack and t h e M opang . Here were names to stir the fancy and paralyze the tongue. What a joy to follow one of these streams clear through its course and come out of the woods in our own craft-from Nicatous to the sea! It was perhaps something in the name, some wild generosity of alphabetical expenditure, that led us to the choice of the Kowahshiscook, or west branch 32 A HOLIDAY IN A VACATION of the Machias River. Or perhaps it was because neither of our guides had been down that stream, and so the whole voyage would be an exploration, with everybody on the same level of experience. An easy day's journey across the lake, and up Comb's Brook, where the trout were abundant, and hy a two-mile carry into Horseshoe Lake, and then over a narrow hardwood ridge, brought us to Green Lake, where we camped for the night in a new log shanty. Here we were at the topmost source-fona et origo -of our chosen river. This single spring, crystalclear and ice-cold, gushing out of the hillside in a forest of spruce and yellow birch and sugar maple, gave us the clue that we must follow for a week through the wilderness. But how changed was that transparent rivulet after it entered the lake. There the water was pale green, translucent but semi-opaque, for at a depth of two or three feet the bottom was hardly visible. The lake was filled, I believe, with some minute aquatic growth which in the course of a thousand years or so would transform it into a meadow. But 33 |