The birds are building, the leaves are green,

And Baron Castine of St. Castine

Hath come at last to his own again."

In course of time the son of the Baron by his Tarratine princess became chief of the tribe and ruled it until in a raid in 1721 he was captured by the English and taken to Boston. When brought before the Council there for trial he wore his French uniform, and was accused of attending an Abenaqui council-fire. He sturdily replied, "I am an Abenaqui by my mother; all my life has been passed among the nation that has made me chief and commander over it. I could not be absent from a council where the interests of my brethren were to be discussed. The dress I now wear is one becoming my rank and birth as an officer of the Most Christian King of France, my master." After being held prisoner several months, he was released, and finally also returned to the ancestral château in the Pyrenees. His lineal descendants are still at the head of the tribe, which has dwindled to almost nothing. Pentagoet honoring the memory, afterwards became Castine. Remains of the old fort and batteries are preserved, and a miniature earthwork commands the harbor. The Tarratines and all the Abenaqui tribes were firm friends of the Americans in the Revolution; there are remnants of them in Canada, but the best preserved is the Indian settlement on Indian Island, in the Penobscot River, above Bangor. For fealty in the Revolution they were given a reservation, where a few hundred descendants now live in a village around their church, having a town hall and schools, with books printed in their own Abenaqui language, and ruled by their tribal officials. This last remnant of a warlike nation with such an interesting history gets a modest subsistence by catching fish and lobsters, and rafting logs on their great river of Norumbega.

ASCENDING THE PENOBSCOT.

The Penobscot drains an immense territory covered with pine, spruce and hemlock forests. Two hundred millions of feet of lumber will be floated down it in a single season. Its bold western bay shore rises into the Camden Mountains, and both sides of the bay were embraced for thirty miles in the Muscongus Patent, a grant of King George I. which came to the colonial Governor Samuel Waldo, of Massachusetts, and afterwards, by descent through his wife, to General Henry Knox. Thus Knox became the Patroon of Penobscot Bay, building a palace at Thomaston, where he lived in baronial state and spent so much money in princely hospitality that he bankrupted himself and almost ruined his Revolutionary compatriot, General Lincoln, who became involved with him. On this western shore, Rockland, with nine thousand people, is a town of sea-captains, fishermen and lime-burners, its rocks making the best lime of the district, and a hundred kilns illuminating the hills at night. Adjacent are Dix Island, and to the southward Vinalhaven Island, producing fine granites shipped abroad for building. To the northward is Camden, under the shadow of Mount Megunticook, its two peaks rising fourteen hundred feet above the harbor. Out in front is an archipelago of pretty islands, the chief being "the insular town of Islesboro," stretching about thirteen miles along the centre of Penobscot Bay, its ten square miles of irregular contour having of late developed into a region of cottages built in all the pleasant places and making a very popular resort. To the northeastward the massive Blue Hill stands up an isolated guardian behind the peninsula of Castine, where the attractive white houses are spread over the broad and sloping point enclosing its deep harbor, and its church-spire rises sharply among the trees. In the eastern archipelago of Penobscot Bay are the Fox Island group of about one hundred and fifty islands, and the larger islands of North Haven and Vinalhaven are to the southward, beyond which are the shores of Cape Rosier, making the eastern border of the bay, while through a vista looms up the distant Isle au Haut, an outer guardian upon the ocean's edge. At the eastern horizon behind the cape rise the hazy, bisected, round-topped peaks of Mount Desert, thirty miles away.

Belfast is another maritime town of Penobscot Bay on a deeply-indented harbor under the shadow of the Camden Hills, the place where Weymouth in 1605 landed and set up the cross. It was settled and named by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in 1770, and it looks out pleasantly across the broad bay upon Castine. Above are Searsport and Fort Point, with the ruins of the colonial Fort Pownall, and then the river is quickly contracted into the Narrows, where the swift tides run at Bucksport. The upper river is sinuous and picturesque, and at the head of navigation, sixty miles from the sea, is Bangor, with twenty thousand people, finely located on commanding hills, its chief industry being the sawing and shipment of lumber. The sawmills line the shores and the log-booms extend for miles along the river. The chief assembly room of the city is the Norumbega Hall, and there also is a Theological Seminary of high standing. It is said that the settlement, which had languished during the Revolution, in 1791 ordered Rev. Seth Noble, its representative in the Legislature, to have it incorporated under the name of Sunbury, but he, being very fond of the old tune of Bangor, wrote that name inadvertently, and it thus was given the town. Thirteen miles northward is Oldtown, another great gathering-place for logs and sawmills, and having the Tarratine Indian settlement on the island in mid-stream. The Penobscot River receives various tributaries above, which drain the extensive northern forests of Maine—the Piscataquis coming from the westward, the Mattawamkeag from the northeast, and the Seboois. The main stream rises near the western Canada border of Maine and flows eastward into Chesuncook Lake, whence its general course to the sea is southeast and south. The river thus drains a broad basin, embracing myriads of lakes in the northern Maine forests, and it has an enormous water-power, as yet only partially utilized.

MOUNT DESERT ISLAND.

Beyond the archipelago, eastward from the Penobscot estuary, is the noted island, presenting the only land along the Atlantic coast where high mountains are in close proximity to the sea. It appears to-day just at it did to Champlain when he first saw it in September, 1604, and, being impressed with its craggy, desolate summits, named it the Isle des Monts déserts, the "Island of Desert Mountains." He then wrote of it, "The land is very high, intersected by passes, appearing from the sea like seven or eight mountains ranged near each other; the summits of the greater part of these are bare of trees, because they are nothing but rocks." In approaching from the southwestward by sea, the distant gray recumbent elephant that has been lying at the horizon gradually resolves its two rounded summits into different peaks; but the finer approach is rather from the northward by the railway route, which is the one most travelled. The quick advance of the train unfolds the separate mountain peaks, and the whole range is well displayed, there being apparently eight eminences, but upon coming nearer, others seem to detach themselves. Green Mountain is the highest, rising over fifteen hundred feet, near the eastern side, while Western Mountain terminates the range on the other side, and at the eastern verge is Newport Mountain, having the fashionable settlement of Bar Harbor at its northern base. There are several beautiful lakes high up among these peaks, the chief being Eagle Lake. Beech and Dog Mountains have peculiarities of outline, and a wider opening between two ponderous peaks shows where the sea has driven-in the strange and deeply carved inlet of Somes' Sound, six miles from the southern side, to almost bisect the island. Hung closely upon the coast of Maine, in Frenchman Bay, this noted island, the ancient Indian Pemetic, is about fifteen miles long, of varying width, and covers a hundred square miles. It has many picturesque features, its mountains, which run in roughly parallel ridges north and south, separated by narrow trough-like valleys, displaying thirteen distinct eminences, the eastern summits being the highest, and terminating generally at or near the water's edge on that side in precipitous cliffs, with the waves dashing against their bases. Upon the southeastern coast, fronting the ocean, as a fitting termination to the grand scenery of these mountain-ranges, the border of the Atlantic is a galaxy of stupendous cliffs, the two most remarkable being of national fame—Schooner Head and Great Head—the full force of old ocean driving against their massive rocky buttresses. Schooner Head has a surface of white rock on its face, which when seen from the sea is fancied to resemble the sails of a small vessel, apparently moving in front of the giant cliff. Great Head, two miles southward, is an abrupt projecting mass of rock, the grim and bold escarpment having deep gashes across the base, evidently worn by the waves. It is the highest headland on the island. Castle Head is a perpendicular columned mass, appearing like a colossal, castellated doorway, flanked by square towers.