Hill after hill, round-shouldered ridge after ridge; low nearer the salt water, increasing very gradually in height till they form the wild amphitheatre of blue peaks in the northern part of the State; partly farming country, and greater part wooded; this is our countryside, and across it and in and out of the forests its countless lovely lakes shine and its great rivers thread their tranquil way to the sea.
[1] The legal distinction in our State is not between ponds and lakes, but between ponds and “Great Ponds.” All land-locked waters over ten acres in area are Great Ponds; in which the public have rights of fishing, ice-cutting, etc.
CHAPTER II—THE RIVER
Our river is one of the pair of kingly streams which traverse almost our entire State from north to south. The first twenty-five miles of its course, after leaving the great lake which it drains, is a tearing rapid between rocky walls: then follows perhaps a hundred miles of alternating falls and “dead water,” the falls being now fast taken up as water powers. It has eleven hundred feet to fall to reach the sea, and it does most of this in its first thirty miles.
The river’s course through part of our county is marked by a noticeable geological formation. For a space of fifteen miles, the greater and lesser tributary streams have broken their way down through the western ridge of the river valley in a succession of small chasms that are so many true mountain defiles in little. They have the sharp descents and extreme variety of slopes and counter-slopes, though with walls never more than a hundred and fifty feet high.
There are forty or fifty of these ravines, some nourishing strong brooks, some a mere trickle, or a stream of green marsh and ferns where water once ran. Acushticook, which threads the largest, is really a river, and Rollingdam, Bombahook, and Worromontogus are all powerful streams. Rollingdam follows a very private course, hidden in deep mossy woods for several miles. The ravine presently deepens and becomes more marked, descending in abrupt slopes, then narrows to a gorge, the rocky sides of which are covered with moss and ferns, nourished by spray. The brook runs through it in two or three short cascades, and falls sheer and white to a pool, twelve feet below.
Below our Town, the river sweeps on, steadily wider and nobler in expanse, till it reaches the place where five other rivers pour their streams into its waters, and it broadens into the sheet of Merrymeeting Bay, three miles from shore to shore.