A Northern Countryside

rks on the logs, and they know the times and ways of all the humbler as well as the larger river craft, the scows and smacks, and the " gundalows" which spend mysterious month after month hauled up among the sedges at the mouths of the streams. Their own row-boats are heavy, square at both ends, and clumsy to row, but as I have said, they are out in them in the spring before the floating ice is out of the river, rescuing logs and fragments of lumber from between the ice-cakes. There is a good deal to the business of picking up logs. The price for returning" strays " to the right owners is ten cents a log (the rate increasing as you go down stream), and a good many can be towed at once by a small boat. The price per log rises to twenty-five cents, near the sea. In times of high freshet, the up-river booms often break, and then there is a tremendous to-do at the mouth of the river: men, women, and children, all who can handle or half-handle a dory, are at work at log-rescuing. Incoming ships have found the surface of the ocean brown with logs at these times, and have a great work to get through them. Logs that have lost their marks are called " scalawags," and these are sold for the benefit of the log-driving company. Hollow- hearted pine logs are known by the curious term " concussy," or " conquassy." To show the immense change in the prices of lumber, the best pine lumber, which in 1870 was worth ten dollars a thousand feet, is now one hundred dollars a thousa... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.