United States or Marshall Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Mount Kinneo is midway up the lake, on the east. It is the show-piece of the region, the best they can do for a precipice, and really admirably done. Kinneo is a solid mass of purple flint rising seven hundred feet upright from the water. By the side of this block could some Archimedes appear, armed with a suitable "pou stô" and a mallet heavy enough, he might strike fire to the world.
Since percussion-guns and friction cigar-lighters came in, flint has somewhat lost its value; and Kinneo is of no practical use at present. We cannot allow inutilities in this world. Where is the Archimedes? He could make a handsome thing of it by flashing us off with a spark into a new system of things.
Moose-meat, combining the flavor of beefsteak and the white of turtle, appears on the table. Moose-horns with full explanations, so that the buyer can play the part of hunter, are for sale. Tame mooselings are exhibited. Sportsmen at Kinneo can choose a matinée with the trout or a soirée with the moose. The chief fact of a moose's person is that pair of strange excrescences, his horns.
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.
New-York women are less exacting; a few of them, indeed, like a dash of the adventurous in their lover; but most of them are business-women, fighting their way out of vulgarity into style, and romance is an interruption. Kinneo was an old station of Iglesias's, in those days when he was probing New England for the picturesque.
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. Suddenly, "Katahdin!" said Iglesias. Yes, there was a dim point, the object of our pilgrimage.
Below this dangerous cliff on the lake-bank is the Kinneo House, where fishermen and sportsmen may dwell, and kill or catch, as skill or fortune favors. The historical success of all catchers and killers is well balanced, since men who cannot master facts are always men of imagination, and it is as easy for them to invent as for the other class to do. Boston men haunt Kinneo.
Word Of The Day