welcome to the wind, and as he nods feels something rattle on his skull.
He nods again, as Homer sometimes did. Lo! something drops. A horn has
dropped, and he stands a bewildered unicorn. For a few days he steers
wild; in this ill-balanced course his lone horn strikes every tree
on this side as he dodges from that side. The unhappy creature is
staggered, body and mind. In what Jericho of the forest can he hide his
diminished head? He flies frantic. He runs amuck through the woods. Days
pass by in gloom, and then comes despair; another horn falls, and he
becomes defenceless; and not till autumn does his brow bear again its
full honors.

I make no apology for giving a few lines to the great event of a moose's
life. He is the hero of those evergreen-woods,--a hero too little
recognized, except by stealthy assassins, meeting him by midnight for
massacre. No one seems to have viewed him in his dramatic character, as
a forest-monarch enacting every year the tragi-comedy of decoronation
and recoronation.

The Kinneo House is head-quarters for moose-hunters. This summer the
waters of Maine were diluvial, the feeding-grounds were swamped. Of this
we took little note: we were in chase of something certain not to
be drowned; and the higher the deluge, the easier we could float to
Katahdin. After dinner we took the steamboat again for the upper end of
the lake.

It was a day of days for sunny summer sailing. Purple haziness curtained
the dark front of Kinneo,--a delicate haze purpled by this black
promontory, but melting blue like a cloud-fall of cloudless sky upon
loftier distant summits. The lake rippled pleasantly, flashing at every
ripple.