Theodore Winthrop

“ Cancut told us, as an instance of judicious economy, how, when he called once upon a recent widow to ask what he could do in his line for her deceased husband’s tomb, she chose from his patterns neat head- and foot-stones for the dear defunct, and then bargained with him to throw in a small pair for her boy Johnny, — a poor, sick crittur, that would be wanting his monument long before next summer.
This lugubrious business had failed to infect Mr. Cancut with corresponding deportment. Undertakers are always sombre in dreary mockery of woe. Sextons are solemncholy, if not solemn. ”

“ Where there is water enough to varnish the pebbles, there it will glide. A birch thirty feet long, big enough for a trio and their traps, weighs only seventy-five pounds. When the rapid passes into a cataract, when the wall of rock across the stream is impregnable in front, it can be taken in the flank by an amphibious birch. The navigator lifts his canoe out of water and bonnets himself with it. ”

“ Caution must be learnt by catastrophe. No one can ever know how unstable a thing is a birch canoe, unless he has felt it slide away from under his misplaced feet. Novices should take nude practice in empty birches, lest they spill themselves and the load of full ones, — a wondrous easy thing to do.
A birch canoe is the right thing in the right place. Maine’s rivers are violently impulsive and spasmodic in their running. ”

“ Sometimes you have a foamy rapid, sometimes a broad shoal, sometimes a barricade of boulders with gleams of white water springing through or leaping over its rocks. Your boat for voyaging here must be stout enough to buffet the rapid, light enough to skim the shallow, agile enough to vault over, or lithe enough to slip through, the barricade. ”

“ Mr. Cancut, owner and steerer of a birch, who now became our “guide, philosopher, and friend,” is as American as a birch, as the Penobscot, or as Katahdin’s self. Cancut was a jolly fatling, — almost too fat, if he will pardon me, for sitting in the stern of the imponderable canoe. Cancut, though for this summer boatman or bircher, had other strings to his bow. He was taking variety now, after employment more monotonous. Last summer, his services had been in request throughout inhabited Maine, to “peddle gravestones and collect bills.” The Gravestone-Peddler is an institution of New England. ”

“ Without discriminating the bereaved households, he presents himself at any door, with attractive drawings of his wares, and seduces people into paying the late tribute to their great-grandfather, or laying up a monument for themselves against the inevitable day of demand. ”