Little Rivers

Little Rivers

by Henry van Dyke

A BOOK OF ESSAYS IN PROFITABLE IDLENESS

"And suppose he takes nothing, yet he enjoyeth a delightful walk by

pleasant Rivers, in sweet Pastures, amongst odoriferous Flowers,

which gratifie his Senses, and delight his Mind; which Contentments

induce many (who affect not Angling) to choose those places of

pleasure for their summer Recreation and Health."

COL. ROBERT VENABLES, The Experienc'd Angler, 1662.

DEDICATION

To one who wanders by my side

As cheerfully as waters glide;

Whose eyes are brown as woodland streams,

And very fair and full of dreams;

Whose heart is like a mountain spring,

Whose thoughts like merry rivers sing:

To her--my little daughter Brooke--

I dedicate this little book.

CONTENTS

I. Prelude

II. Little Rivers

III. A Leaf of Spearmint

IV. Ampersand

V. A Handful of Heather

VI. The Ristigouche from a Horse-Yacht

VII. Alpenrosen and Goat's-Milk

VIII. Au Large

IX. Trout-Fishing in the Traun

X. At the sign of the Balsam Bough

XI. A Song after Sundown

PRELUDE

AN ANGLER'S WISH IN TOWN

When tulips bloom in Union Square,

And timid breaths of vernal air

Are wandering down the dusty town,

Like children lost in Vanity Fair;

When every long, unlovely row

Of westward houses stands aglow

And leads the eyes toward sunset skies,

Beyond the hills where green trees grow;

Then weary is the street parade,

And weary books, and weary trade:

I'm only wishing to go a-fishing;

For this the month of May was made.

I guess the pussy-willows now

Are creeping out on every bough

Along the brook; and robins look

For early worms behind the plough.

The thistle-birds have changed their dun

For yellow coats to match the sun;

And in the same array of flame

The Dandelion Show's begun.

The flocks of young anemones

Are dancing round the budding trees:

Who can help wishing to go a-fishing

In days as full of joy as these?

I think the meadow-lark's clear sound

Leaks upward slowly from the ground,

While on the wing the bluebirds ring

Their wedding-bells to woods around:

The flirting chewink calls his dear

Behind the bush; and very near,

Where water flows, where green grass grows,

Song-sparrows gently sing, "Good cheer:"

And, best of all, through twilight's calm

The hermit-thrush repeats his psalm:

How much I'm wishing to go a-fishing

In days so sweet with music's balm!

'Tis not a proud desire of mine;

I ask for nothing superfine;

No heavy weight, no salmon great,

To break the record, or my line:

Only an idle little stream,

Whose amber waters softly gleam,

Where I may wade, through woodland shade,

And cast the fly, and loaf, and dream:

Only a trout or two, to dart

From foaming pools, and try my art:

No more I'm wishing--old-fashioned fishing,

And just a day on Nature's heart.

LITTLE RIVERS

A river is the most human and companionable of all inanimate

things. It has a life, a character, a voice of its own, and is as

full of good fellowship as a sugar-maple is of sap. It can talk in

various tones, loud or low, and of many subjects, grave and gay.

Under favourable circumstances it will even make a shift to sing,

not in a fashion that can be reduced to notes and set down in black

and white on a sheet of paper, but in a vague, refreshing manner,

and to a wandering air that goes

"Over the hills and far away."

For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside of the

animal kingdom that is comparable to a river.

I will admit that a very good case can be made out in favour of

some other objects of natural affection. For example, a fair

apology has been offered by those ambitious persons who have fallen

in love with the sea. But, after all, that is a formless and

disquieting passion. It lacks solid comfort and mutual confidence.

The sea is too big for loving, and too uncertain. It will not fit

into our thoughts. It has no personality because it has so many.

It is a salt abstraction. You might as well think of loving a

glittering generality like "the American woman." One would be more

to the purpose.

Mountains are more satisfying because they are more individual. It

is possible to feel a very strong attachment for a certain range

whose outline has grown familiar to our eyes, or a clear peak that

has looked down, day after day, upon our joys and sorrows,

moderating our passions with its calm aspect. We come back from

our travels, and the sight of such a well-known mountain is like

meeting an old friend unchanged. But it is a one-sided affection.

The mountain is voiceless and imperturbable; and its very loftiness

and serenity sometimes make us the more lonely.

Trees seem to come closer to our life. They are often rooted in

our richest feelings, and our sweetest memories, like birds, build

nests in their branches. I remember, the last time that I saw

James Russell Lowell, (only a few weeks before his musical voice

was hushed,) he walked out with me into the quiet garden at Elmwood

to say good-bye. There was a great horse-chestnut tree beside the

house, towering above the gable, and covered with blossoms from

base to summit,--a pyramid of green supporting a thousand smaller

pyramids of white. The poet looked up at it with his gray, pain-

furrowed face, and laid his trembling hand upon the trunk. "I

planted the nut," said he, "from which this tree grew. And my

father was with me and showed me how to plant it."

Yes, there is a good deal to be said in behalf of tree-worship; and

when I recline with my friend Tityrus beneath the shade of his

favourite oak, I consent in his devotions. But when I invite him

with me to share my orisons, or wander alone to indulge the luxury

of grateful, unlaborious thought, my feet turn not to a tree, but

to the bank of a river, for there the musings of solitude find a

friendly accompaniment, and human intercourse is purified and

sweetened by the flowing, murmuring water. It is by a river that I

would choose to make love, and to revive old friendships, and to

play with the children, and to confess my faults, and to escape

from vain, selfish desires, and to cleanse my mind from all the

false and foolish things that mar the joy and peace of living.

Like David's hart, I pant for the water-brooks. There is wisdom in

the advice of Seneca, who says, "Where a spring rises, or a river

flows, there should we build altars and offer sacrifices."

The personality of a river is not to be found in its water, nor in

its bed, nor in its shore. Either of these elements, by itself,

would be nothing. Confine the fluid contents of the noblest stream

in a walled channel of stone, and it ceases to be a stream; it

becomes what Charles Lamb calls "a mockery of a river--a liquid

artifice--a wretched conduit." But take away the water from the

most beautiful river-banks, and what is left? An ugly road with

none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on the bosom of the earth.

The life of a river, like that of a human being, consists in the

union of soul and body, the water and the banks. They belong

together. They act and react upon each other. The stream moulds

and makes the shore; hollowing out a bay here, and building a long

point there; alluring the little bushes close to its side, and

bending the tall slim trees over its current; sweeping a rocky

ledge clean of everything but moss, and sending a still lagoon full

of white arrow-heads and rosy knot-weed far back into the meadow.

The shore guides and controls the stream; now detaining and now

advancing it; now bending it in a hundred sinuous curves, and now

speeding it straight as a wild-bee on its homeward flight; here

hiding the water in a deep cleft overhung with green branches, and

there spreading it out, like a mirror framed in daisies, to reflect

the sky and the clouds; sometimes breaking it with sudden turns and

unexpected falls into a foam of musical laughter, sometimes

soothing it into a sleepy motion like the flow of a dream.

Is it otherwise with the men and women whom we know and like? Does

not the spirit influence the form, and the form affect the spirit?

Can we divide and separate them in our affections?

I am no friend to purely psychological attachments. In some

unknown future they may be satisfying, but in the present I want

your words and your voice with your thoughts, your looks and your

gestures to interpret your feelings. The warm, strong grasp of

Greatheart's hand is as dear to me as the steadfast fashion of his

friendships; the lively, sparkling eyes of the master of Rudder

Grange charm me as much as the nimbleness of his fancy; and the

firm poise of the Hoosier Schoolmaster's shaggy head gives me new

confidence in the solidity of his views of life. I like the pure

tranquillity of Isabel's brow as well as her

                "most silver flow

 Of subtle-paced counsel in distress."

The soft cadences and turns in my lady Katrina's speech draw me

into the humour of her gentle judgments of men and things. The

touches of quaintness in Angelica's dress, her folded kerchief and

smooth-parted hair, seem to partake of herself, and enhance my

admiration for the sweet order of her thoughts and her old-

fashioned ideals of love and duty. Even so the stream and its

channel are one life, and I cannot think of the swift, brown flood

of the Batiscan without its shadowing primeval forests, or the

crystalline current of the Boquet without its beds of pebbles and

golden sand and grassy banks embroidered with flowers.

Every country--or at least every country that is fit for

habitation--has its own rivers; and every river has its own

quality; and it is the part of wisdom to know and love as many as

you can, seeing each in the fairest possible light, and receiving

from each the best that it has to give. The torrents of Norway

leap down from their mountain home with plentiful cataracts, and

run brief but glorious races to the sea. The streams of England

move smoothly through green fields and beside ancient, sleepy

towns. The Scotch rivers brawl through the open moorland and flash

along steep Highland glens. The rivers of the Alps are born in icy

caves, from which they issue forth with furious, turbid waters; but

when their anger has been forgotten in the slumber of some blue

lake, they flow down more softly to see the vineyards of France and

Italy, the gray castles of Germany, the verdant meadows of Holland.

The mighty rivers of the West roll their yellow floods through

broad valleys, or plunge down dark canyons. The rivers of the

South creep under dim arboreal archways hung with banners of waving

moss. The Delaware and the Hudson and the Connecticut are the

children of the Catskills and the Adirondacks and the White

Mountains, cradled among the forests of spruce and hemlock, playing

through a wild woodland youth, gathering strength from numberless

tributaries to bear their great burdens of lumber and turn the

wheels of many mills, issuing from the hills to water a thousand

farms, and descending at last, beside new cities, to the ancient

sea.

Every river that flows is good, and has something worthy to be

loved. But those that we love most are always the ones that we

have known best,--the stream that ran before our father's door, the

current on which we ventured our first boat or cast our first fly,

the brook on whose banks we first picked the twinflower of young

love. However far we may travel, we come back to Naaman's state of

mind: "Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than

all the waters of Israel?"

It is with rivers as it is with people: the greatest are not always

the most agreeable, nor the best to live with. Diogenes must have

been an uncomfortable bedfellow: Antinous was bored to death in the

society of the Emperor Hadrian: and you can imagine much better

company for a walking trip than Napoleon Bonaparte. Semiramis was

a lofty queen, but I fancy that Ninus had more than one bad

quarter-of-an-hour with her: and in "the spacious times of great

Elizabeth" there was many a milkmaid whom the wise man would have

chosen for his friend, before the royal red-haired virgin. "I

confess," says the poet Cowley, "I love littleness almost in all

things. A little convenient Estate, a little chearful House, a

little Company, and a very little Feast, and if I were ever to fall

in Love again, (which is a great Passion, and therefore, I hope, I

have done with it,) it would be, I think, with Prettiness, rather

than with Majestical Beauty. I would neither wish that my

Mistress, nor my Fortune, should be a Bona Roba, as Homer uses to

describe his Beauties, like a daughter of great Jupiter for the

stateliness and largeness of her Person, but as Lucretius says:

'Parvula, pumilio, [Greek text omitted], tota merum sal.'"

Now in talking about women it is prudent to disguise a prejudice

like this, in the security of a dead language, and to intrench it

behind a fortress of reputable authority. But in lowlier and less

dangerous matters, such as we are now concerned with, one may dare

to speak in plain English. I am all for the little rivers. Let

those who will, chant in heroic verse the renown of Amazon and

Mississippi and Niagara, but my prose shall flow--or straggle along

at such a pace as the prosaic muse may grant me to attain--in

praise of Beaverkill and Neversink and Swiftwater, of Saranac and

Raquette and Ausable, of Allegash and Aroostook and Moose River.

"Whene'er I take my walks abroad," it shall be to trace the clear

Rauma from its rise on the fjeld to its rest in the fjord; or to

follow the Ericht and the Halladale through the heather. The

Ziller and the Salzach shall be my guides through the Tyrol; the

Rotha and the Dove shall lead me into the heart of England. My

sacrificial flames shall be kindled with birch-bark along the

wooded stillwaters of the Penobscot and the Peribonca, and my

libations drawn from the pure current of the Ristigouche and the

Ampersand, and my altar of remembrance shall rise upon the rocks

beside the falls of Seboomok.

I will set my affections upon rivers that are not too great for

intimacy. And if by chance any of these little ones have also

become famous, like the Tweed and the Thames and the Arno, I at

least will praise them, because they are still at heart little

rivers.

If an open fire is, as Charles Dudley Warner says, the eye of a

room; then surely a little river may be called the mouth, the most

expressive feature, of a landscape. It animates and enlivens the

whole scene. Even a railway journey becomes tolerable when the

track follows the course of a running stream.

What charming glimpses you catch from the window as the train winds

along the valley of the French Broad from Asheville, or climbs the

southern Catskills beside the Aesopus, or slides down the

Pusterthal with the Rienz, or follows the Glommen and the Gula from

Christiania to Throndhjem. Here is a mill with its dripping, lazy

wheel, the type of somnolent industry; and there is a white

cascade, foaming in silent pantomime as the train clatters by; and

here is a long, still pool with the cows standing knee-deep in the

water and swinging their tails in calm indifference to the passing

world; and there is a lone fisherman sitting upon a rock, rapt in

contemplation of the point of his rod. For a moment you become a

partner of his tranquil enterprise. You turn around, you crane

your neck to get the last sight of his motionless angle. You do

not know what kind of fish he expects to catch, nor what species of

bait he is using, but at least you pray that he may have a bite

before the train swings around the next curve. And if perchance

your wish is granted, and you see him gravely draw some unknown,

reluctant, shining reward of patience from the water, you feel like

swinging your hat from the window and crying out "Good luck!"

Little rivers seem to have the indefinable quality that belongs to

certain people in the world,--the power of drawing attention

without courting it, the faculty of exciting interest by their very

presence and way of doing things.

The most fascinating part of a city or town is that through which

the water flows. Idlers always choose a bridge for their place of

meditation when they can get it; and, failing that, you will find

them sitting on the edge of a quay or embankment, with their feet

hanging over the water. What a piquant mingling of indolence and

vivacity you can enjoy by the river-side! The best point of view

in Rome, to my taste, is the Ponte San Angelo; and in Florence or

Pisa I never tire of loafing along the Lung' Arno. You do not know

London until you have seen it from the Thames. And you will miss

the charm of Cambridge unless you take a little boat and go

drifting on the placid Cam, beneath the bending trees, along the

backs of the colleges.

But the real way to know a little river is not to glance at it here

or there in the course of a hasty journey, nor to become acquainted

with it after it has been partly civilised and spoiled by too close

contact with the works of man. You must go to its native haunts;

you must see it in youth and freedom; you must accommodate yourself

to its pace, and give yourself to its influence, and follow its

meanderings whithersoever they may lead you.

Now, of this pleasant pastime there are three principal forms. You

may go as a walker, taking the river-side path, or making a way for

yourself through the tangled thickets or across the open meadows.

You may go as a sailor, launching your light canoe on the swift

current and committing yourself for a day, or a week, or a month,

to the delightful uncertainties of a voyage through the forest.

You may go as a wader, stepping into the stream and going down with

it, through rapids and shallows and deeper pools, until you come to

the end of your courage and the daylight. Of these three ways I

know not which is best. But in all of them the essential thing is

that you must be willing and glad to be led; you must take the

little river for your guide, philosopher, and friend.

And what a good guidance it gives you. How cheerfully it lures you

on into the secrets of field and wood, and brings you acquainted

with the birds and the flowers. The stream can show you, better

than any other teacher, how nature works her enchantments with

colour and music.

Go out to the Beaver-kill

"In the tassel-time of spring,"

and follow its brimming waters through the budding forests, to that

corner which we call the Painter's Camp. See how the banks are all

enamelled with the pale hepatica, the painted trillium, and the

delicate pink-veined spring beauty. A little later in the year,

when the ferns are uncurling their long fronds, the troops of blue

and white violets will come dancing down to the edge of the stream,

and creep venturously out to the very end of that long, moss-

covered log in the water. Before these have vanished, the yellow

crow-foot and the cinquefoil will appear, followed by the star-

grass and the loose-strife and the golden St. John's-wort. Then

the unseen painter begins to mix the royal colour on his palette,

and the red of the bee-balm catches your eye. If you are lucky,

you may find, in midsummer, a slender fragrant spike of the purple-

fringed orchis, and you cannot help finding the universal self-

heal. Yellow returns in the drooping flowers of the jewel-weed,

and blue repeats itself in the trembling hare-bells, and scarlet is

glorified in the flaming robe of the cardinal-flower. Later still,

the summer closes in a splendour of bloom, with gentians and asters

and goldenrod.

You never get so close to the birds as when you are wading quietly

down a little river, casting your fly deftly under the branches for

the wary trout, but ever on the lookout for all the various

pleasant things that nature has to bestow upon you. Here you shall

come upon the cat-bird at her morning bath, and hear her sing, in a

clump of pussy-willows, that low, tender, confidential song which

she keeps for the hours of domestic intimacy. The spotted

sandpiper will run along the stones before you, crying, "wet-feet,

wet-feet!" and bowing and teetering in the friendliest manner, as

if to show you the way to the best pools. In the thick branches of

the hemlocks that stretch across the stream, the tiny warblers,

dressed in a hundred colours, chirp and twitter confidingly above

your head; and the Maryland yellow-throat, flitting through the

bushes like a little gleam of sunlight, calls "witchery, witchery,

witchery!" That plaintive, forsaken, persistent note, never

ceasing, even in the noonday silence, comes from the wood-pewee,

drooping upon the bough of some high tree, and complaining, like

Mariana in the moated grange, "weary, weary, weary!"

When the stream runs out into the old clearing, or down through the

pasture, you find other and livelier birds,--the robins, with his

sharp, saucy call and breathless, merry warble; the bluebird, with

his notes of pure gladness, and the oriole, with his wild, flexible

whistle; the chewink, bustling about in the thicket, talking to his

sweetheart in French, "cherie, cherie!" and the song-sparrow,

perched on his favourite limb of a young maple, dose beside the

water, and singing happily, through sunshine and through rain.

This is the true bird of the brook, after all: the winged spirit of

cheerfulness and contentment, the patron saint of little rivers,

the fisherman's friend. He seems to enter into your sport with his

good wishes, and for an hour at a time, while you are trying every

fly in your book, from a black gnat to a white miller, to entice

the crafty old trout at the foot of the meadow-pool, the song-

sparrow, close above you, will be chanting patience and

encouragement. And when at last success crowns your endeavour, and

the parti-coloured prize is glittering in your net, the bird on the

bough breaks out in an ecstasy of congratulation: "catch 'im, catch

'im, catch 'im; oh, what a pretty fellow! sweet!"

There are other birds that seem to have a very different temper.

The blue-jay sits high up in the withered-pine tree, bobbing up and

down, and calling to his mate in a tone of affected sweetness.

"salute-her, salute-her," but when you come in sight he flies away

with a harsh cry of "thief, thief, thief!" The kingfisher,

ruffling his crest in solitary pride on the end of a dead branch,

darts down the stream at your approach, winding up his red angrily

as if he despised you for interrupting his fishing. And the cat-

bird, that sang so charmingly while she thought herself unobserved,

now tries to scare you away by screaming "snake, snake!"

As evening draws near, and the light beneath the trees grows

yellower, and the air is full of filmy insects out for their last

dance, the voice of the little river becomes louder and more

distinct. The true poets have often noticed this apparent increase

in the sound of flowing waters at nightfall. Gray, in one of his

letters, speaks of "hearing the murmur of many waters not audible

in the daytime." Wordsworth repeats the same thought almost in the

same words:

"A soft and lulling sound is heard

 Of streams inaudible by day."

And Tennyson, in the valley of Cauteretz, tells of the river

"Deepening his voice with deepening of the night."

It is in this mystical hour that you will hear the most celestial

and entrancing of all bird-notes, the songs of the thrushes,--the

hermit, and the wood-thrush, and the veery. Sometimes, but not

often, you will see the singers. I remember once, at the close of

a beautiful day's fishing on the Swiftwater, I came out, just after

sunset, into a little open space in an elbow of the stream. It was

still early spring, and the leaves were tiny. On the top of a

small sumac, not thirty feet away from me, sat a veery. I could

see the pointed spots upon his breast, the swelling of his white

throat, and the sparkle of his eyes, as he poured his whole heart

into a long liquid chant, the clear notes rising and falling,

echoing and interlacing in endless curves of sound,

"Orb within orb, intricate, wonderful."

Other bird-songs can be translated into words, but not this. There

is no interpretation. It is music,--as Sidney Lanier defines it,--

"Love in search of a word."

But it is not only to the real life of birds and flowers that the

little rivers introduce you. They lead you often into familiarity

with human nature in undress, rejoicing in the liberty of old

clothes, or of none at all. People do not mince along the banks of

streams in patent-leather shoes or crepitating silks. Corduroy and

home-spun and flannel are the stuffs that suit this region; and the

frequenters of these paths go their natural gaits, in calf-skin or

rubber boots, or bare-footed. The girdle of conventionality is

laid aside, and the skirts rise with the spirits.

A stream that flows through a country of upland farms will show you

many a pretty bit of genre painting. Here is the laundry-pool at

the foot of the kitchen garden, and the tubs are set upon a few

planks close to the water, and the farmer's daughters, with bare

arms and gowns tucked up, are wringing out the clothes. Do you

remember what happened to Ralph Peden in The Lilac Sunbonnet when

he came on a scene like this? He tumbled at once into love with

Winsome Charteris,--and far over his head.

And what a pleasant thing it is to see a little country lad riding

one of the plough-horses to water, thumping his naked heels against

the ribs of his stolid steed, and pulling hard on the halter as if

it were the bridle of Bucephalus! Or perhaps it is a riotous

company of boys that have come down to the old swimming-hole, and

are now splashing and gambolling through the water like a drove of

white seals very much sun-burned. You had hoped to catch a goodly

trout in that hole, but what of that? The sight of a harmless hour

of mirth is better than a fish, any day.

Possibly you will overtake another fisherman on the stream. It may

be one of those fabulous countrymen, with long cedar poles and bed-

cord lines, who are commonly reported to catch such enormous

strings of fish, but who rarely, so far as my observation goes, do

anything more than fill their pockets with fingerlings. The

trained angler, who uses the finest tackle, and drops his fly on

the water as accurately as Henry James places a word in a story, is

the man who takes the most and the largest fish in the long run.

Perhaps the fisherman ahead of you is such an one,--a man whom you

have known in town as a lawyer or a doctor, a merchant or a

preacher, going about his business in the hideous respectability of

a high silk hat and a long black coat. How good it is to see him

now in the freedom of a flannel shirt and a broad-brimmed gray felt

with flies stuck around the band.

In Professor John Wilson's Essays Critical and Imaginative, there

is a brilliant description of a bishop fishing, which I am sure is

drawn from the life: "Thus a bishop, sans wig and petticoat, in a

hairy cap, black jacket, corduroy breeches and leathern leggins,

creel on back and rod in hand, sallying from his palace, impatient

to reach a famous salmon-cast ere the sun leave his cloud, . . .

appears not only a pillar of his church, but of his kind, and in

such a costume is manifestly on the high road to Canterbury and the

Kingdom-Come." I have had the good luck to see quite a number of

bishops, parochial and diocesan, in that style, and the vision has

always dissolved my doubts in regard to the validity of their claim

to the true apostolic succession.

Men's "little ways" are usually more interesting, and often more

instructive than their grand manners. When they are off guard,

they frequently show to better advantage than when they are on

parade. I get more pleasure out of Boswell's Johnson than I do out

of Rasselas or The Rambler. The Little Flowers of St. Francis

appear to me far more precious than the most learned German and

French analyses of his character. There is a passage in Jonathan

Edwards' Personal Narrative, about a certain walk that he took in

the fields near his father's house, and the blossoming of the

flowers in the spring, which I would not exchange for the whole of

his dissertation On the Freedom of the Will. And the very best

thing of Charles Darwin's that I know is a bit from a letter to his

wife: "At last I fell asleep," says he, "on the grass, and awoke

with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up

the tree, and some woodpeckers laughing; and it was as pleasant and

rural a scene as ever I saw; and I did not care one penny how any

of the birds or beasts had been formed."

Little rivers have small responsibilities. They are not expected

to bear huge navies on their breast or supply a hundred-thousand

horse-power to the factories of a monstrous town. Neither do you

come to them hoping to draw out Leviathan with a hook. It is

enough if they run a harmless, amiable course, and keep the groves

and fields green and fresh along their banks, and offer a happy

alternation of nimble rapids and quiet pools,

"With here and there a lusty trout,

 And here and there a grayling."

When you set out to explore one of these minor streams in your

canoe, you have no intention of epoch-making discoveries, or

thrilling and world-famous adventures. You float placidly down the

long stillwaters, and make your way patiently through the tangle of

fallen trees that block the stream, and run the smaller falls, and

carry your boat around the larger ones, with no loftier ambition

than to reach a good camp-ground before dark and to pass the

intervening hours pleasantly, "without offence to God or man." It

is an agreeable and advantageous frame of mind for one who has done

his fair share of work in the world, and is not inclined to grumble

at his wages. There are few moods in which we are more susceptible

of gentle instruction; and I suspect there are many tempers and

attitudes, often called virtuous, in which the human spirit appears

to less advantage in the sight of Heaven.

It is not required of every man and woman to be, or to do,

something great; most of us must content ourselves with taking

small parts in the chorus. Shall we have no little lyrics because

Homer and Dante have written epics? And because we have heard the

great organ at Freiburg, shall the sound of Kathi's zither in the

alpine hut please us no more? Even those who have greatness thrust

upon them will do well to lay the burden down now and then, and

congratulate themselves that they are not altogether answerable for

the conduct of the universe, or at least not all the time. "I

reckon," said a cowboy to me one day, as we were riding through the

Bad Lands of Dakota, "there's some one bigger than me, running this

outfit. He can 'tend to it well enough, while I smoke my pipe

after the round-up."

There is such a thing as taking ourselves and the world too

seriously, or at any rate too anxiously. Half of the secular

unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the

vain idea that every man is bound to be a critic of life, and to

let no day pass without finding some fault with the general order

of things, or projecting some plan for its improvement. And the

other half comes from the greedy notion that a man's life does

consist, after all, in the abundance of the things that he

possesses, and that it is somehow or other more respectable and

pious to be always at work making a larger living, than it is to

lie on your back in the green pastures and beside the still waters,

and thank God that you are alive.

Come, then, my gentle reader, (for by this time you have discovered

that this chapter is only a preface in disguise,--a declaration of

principles or the want of them, an apology or a defence, as you

choose to take it,) and if we are agreed, let us walk together; but

if not, let us part here with out ill-will.

You shall not be deceived in this book. It is nothing but a

handful of rustic variations on the old tune of "Rest and be

thankful," a record of unconventional travel, a pilgrim's scrip

with a few bits of blue-sky philosophy in it. There is, so far as

I know, very little useful information and absolutely no criticism

of the universe to be found in this volume. So if you are what

Izaak Walton calls "a severe, sour-complexioned man," you would

better carry it back to the bookseller, and get your money again,

if he will give it to you, and go your way rejoicing after your own

melancholy fashion.

But if you care for plain pleasures, and informal company, and

friendly observations on men and things, (and a few true fish-

stories,) then perhaps you may find something here not unworthy

your perusal. And so I wish that your winter fire may burn clear

and bright while you read these pages; and that the summer days may

be fair, and the fish may rise merrily to your fly, whenever you

follow one of these little rivers.

A LEAF OF SPEARMINT

RECOLLECTIONS OF A BOY AND A ROD.

"It puzzles me now, that I remember all these young impressions so,

because I took no heed of them at the time whatever; and yet they

come upon me bright, when nothing else is evident in the gray fog

of experience."--B. D. BLACKMORE: Lorna Doone.

Of all the faculties of the human mind, memory is the one that is

most easily "led by the nose." There is a secret power in the

sense of smell which draws the mind backward into the pleasant land

of old times.

If you could paint a picture of Memory, in the symbolical manner of

Quarles's Emblems, it should represent a man travelling the highway

with a dusty pack upon his shoulders, and stooping to draw in a

long, sweet breath from the small, deep-red, golden-hearted flowers

of an old-fashioned rose-tree straggling through the fence of a

neglected garden. Or perhaps, for a choice of emblems, you would

better take a yet more homely and familiar scent: the cool

fragrance of lilacs drifting through the June morning from the old

bush that stands between the kitchen door and the well; the warm

layer of pungent, aromatic air that floats over the tansy-bed in a

still July noon; the drowsy dew of odour that falls from the big

balm-of-Gilead tree by the roadside as you are driving homeward

through the twilight of August; or, best of all, the clean, spicy,

unexpected, unmistakable smell of a bed of spearmint--that is the

bed whereon Memory loves to lie and dream!

Why not choose mint as the symbol of remembrance? It is the true

spice-tree of our Northern clime, the myrrh and frankincense of the

land of lingering snow. When its perfume rises, the shrines of the

past are unveiled, and the magical rites of reminiscence begin.

I.

You are fishing down the Swiftwater in the early Spring. In a

shallow pool, which the drought of summer will soon change into dry

land, you see the pale-green shoots of a little plant thrusting

themselves up between the pebbles, and just beginning to overtop

the falling water. You pluck a leaf of it as you turn out of the

stream to find a comfortable place for lunch, and, rolling it

between your fingers to see whether it smells like a good salad for

your bread and cheese, you discover suddenly that it is new mint.

For the rest of that day you are bewitched; you follow a stream

that runs through the country of Auld Lang Syne, and fill your

creel with the recollections of a boy and a rod.

And yet, strangely enough, you cannot recall the boy himself at all

distinctly. There is only the faintest image of him on the endless

roll of films that has been wound through your mental camera: and

in the very spots where his small figure should appear, it seems as

if the pictures were always light-struck. Just a blur, and the dim

outline of a new cap, or a well-beloved jacket with extra pockets,

or a much-hated pair of copper-toed shoes--that is all you can see.

But the people that the boy saw, the companions who helped or

hindered him in his adventures, the sublime and marvellous scenes

among the Catskills and the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains, in

the midst of which he lived and moved and had his summer holidays--

all these stand out sharp and clear, as the "Bab Ballads" say,

"Photographically lined

 On the tablets of your mind."

And most vivid do these scenes and people become when the vague and

irrecoverable boy who walks among them carries a rod over his

shoulder, and you detect the soft bulginess of wet fish about his

clothing, and perhaps the tail of a big one emerging from his

pocket. Then it seems almost as if these were things that had

really happened, and of which you yourself were a great part.

The rod was a reward, yet not exactly of merit. It was an

instrument of education in the hand of a father less indiscriminate

than Solomon, who chose to interpret the text in a new way, and

preferred to educate his child by encouraging him in pursuits which

were harmless and wholesome, rather than by chastising him for

practices which would likely enough never have been thought of, if

they had not been forbidden. The boy enjoyed this kind of father

at the time, and later he came to understand, with a grateful

heart, that there is no richer inheritance in all the treasury of

unearned blessings. For, after all, the love, the patience, the

kindly wisdom of a grown man who can enter into the perplexities

and turbulent impulses of a boy's heart, and give him cheerful

companionship, and lead him on by free and joyful ways to know and

choose the things that are pure and lovely and of good report, make

as fair an image as we can find of that loving, patient Wisdom

which must be above us all if any good is to come out of our

childish race.

Now this was the way in which the boy came into possession of his

undreaded rod. He was by nature and heredity one of those

predestined anglers whom Izaak Walton tersely describes as "born

so." His earliest passion was fishing. His favourite passage in

Holy Writ was that place where Simon Peter throws a line into the

sea and pulls out a great fish at the first cast.

But hitherto his passion had been indulged under difficulties--with

improvised apparatus of cut poles, and flabby pieces of string, and

bent pins, which always failed to hold the biggest fish; or perhaps

with borrowed tackle, dangling a fat worm in vain before the noses

of the staring, supercilious sunfish that poised themselves in the

clear water around the Lake house dock at Lake George; or, at best,

on picnic parties across the lake, marred by the humiliating

presence of nurses, and disturbed by the obstinate refusal of old

Horace, the boatman, to believe that the boy could bait his own

hook, but sometimes crowned with the delight of bringing home a

whole basketful of yellow perch and goggle-eyes. Of nobler sport

with game fish, like the vaulting salmon and the merry, pugnacious

trout, as yet the boy had only dreamed. But he had heard that

there were such fish in the streams that flowed down from the

mountains around Lake George, and he was at the happy age when he

could believe anything--if it was sufficiently interesting.

There was one little river, and only one, within his knowledge and

the reach of his short legs. It was a tiny, lively rivulet that

came out of the woods about half a mile away from the hotel, and

ran down cater-cornered through a sloping meadow, crossing the road

under a flat bridge of boards, just beyond the root-beer shop at

the lower end of the village. It seemed large enough to the boy,

and he had long had his eye upon it as a fitting theatre for the

beginning of a real angler's life. Those rapids, those falls,

those deep, whirling pools with beautiful foam on them like soft,

white custard, were they not such places as the trout loved to hide

in?

You can see the long hotel piazza, with the gossipy groups of

wooden chairs standing vacant in the early afternoon; for the

grown-up people are dallying with the ultimate nuts and raisins of

their mid-day dinner. A villainous clatter of innumerable little

vegetable-dishes comes from the open windows of the pantry as the

boy steals past the kitchen end of the house, with Horace's

lightest bamboo pole over his shoulder, and a little brother in

skirts and short white stockings tagging along behind him.

When they come to the five-rail fence where the brook runs out of

the field, the question is, Over or under? The lowlier method

seems safer for the little brother, as well as less conspicuous for

persons who desire to avoid publicity until their enterprise has

achieved success. So they crawl beneath a bend in the lowest

rail,--only tearing one tiny three-cornered hole in a jacket, and

making some juicy green stains on the white stockings,--and emerge

with suppressed excitement in the field of the cloth of buttercups

and daisies.

What an afternoon--how endless and yet how swift! What perilous

efforts to leap across the foaming stream at its narrowest points;

what escapes from quagmires and possible quicksands; what stealthy

creeping through the grass to the edge of a likely pool, and

cautious dropping of the line into an unseen depth, and patient

waiting for a bite, until the restless little brother, prowling

about below, discovers that the hook is not in the water at all,

but lying on top of a dry stone,--thereby proving that patience is

not the only virtue--or, at least, that it does a better business

when it has a small vice of impatience in partnership with it!

How tired the adventurers grow as the day wears away; and as yet

they have taken nothing! But their strength and courage return as

if by magic when there comes a surprising twitch at the line in a

shallow, unpromising rapid, and with a jerk of the pole a small,

wiggling fish is whirled through the air and landed thirty feet

back in the meadow.

"For pity's sake, don't lose him! There he is among the roots of

the blue flag."

"I've got him! How cold he is--how slippery--how pretty! Just

like a piece of rainbow!"

"Do you see the red spots? Did you notice how gamy he was, little

brother; how he played? It is a trout, for sure; a real trout,

almost as long as your hand."

So the two lads tramp along up the stream, chattering as if there

were no rubric of silence in the angler's code. Presently another

simple-minded troutling falls a victim to their unpremeditated art;

and they begin already, being human, to wish for something larger.

In the very last pool that they dare attempt--a dark hole under a

steep bank, where the brook issues from the woods--the boy drags

out the hoped-for prize, a splendid trout, longer than a new lead-

pencil. But he feels sure that there must be another, even larger,

in the same place. He swings his line out carefully over the

water, and just as he is about to drop it in, the little brother,

perched on the sloping brink, slips on the smooth pine-needles, and

goes sliddering down into the pool up to his waist. How he weeps

with dismay, and how funnily his dress sticks to him as he crawls

out! But his grief is soon assuaged by the privilege of carrying

the trout strung on an alder twig; and it is a happy, muddy, proud

pair of urchins that climb over the fence out of the field of

triumph at the close of the day.

What does the father say, as he meets them in the road? Is he

frowning or smiling under that big brown beard? You cannot be

quite sure. But one thing is clear: he is as much elated over the

capture of the real trout as any one. He is ready to deal mildly

with a little irregularity for the sake of encouraging pluck and

perseverance. Before the three comrades have reached the hotel,

the boy has promised faithfully never to take his little brother

off again without asking leave; and the father has promised that

the boy shall have a real jointed fishing-rod of his own, so that

he will not need to borrow old Horace's pole any more.

At breakfast the next morning the family are to have a private

dish; not an every-day affair of vulgar, bony fish that nurses can

catch, but trout--three of them! But the boy looks up from the

table and sees the adored of his soul, Annie V----, sitting at the

other end of the room, and faring on the common food of mortals.

Shall she eat the ordinary breakfast while he feasts on dainties?

Do not other sportsmen send their spoils to the ladies whom they

admire? The waiter must bring a hot plate, and take this largest

trout to Miss V---- (Miss Annie, not her sister--make no mistake

about it).

The face of Augustus is as solemn as an ebony idol while he plays

his part of Cupid's messenger. The fair Annie affects surprise;

she accepts the offering rather indifferently; her curls drop down

over her cheeks to cover some small confusion. But for an instant

the corner of her eye catches the boy's sidelong glance, and she

nods perceptibly, whereupon his mother very inconsiderately calls

attention to the fact that yesterday's escapade has sun-burned his

face dreadfully.

Beautiful Annie V----, who, among all the unripened nymphs that

played at hide-and-seek among the maples on the hotel lawn, or

waded with white feet along the yellow beach beyond the point of

pines, flying with merry shrieks into the woods when a boat-load of

boys appeared suddenly around the corner, or danced the lancers in

the big, bare parlours before the grown-up ball began--who in all

that joyous, innocent bevy could be compared with you for charm or

daring? How your dark eyes sparkled, and how the long brown

ringlets tossed around your small head, when you stood up that

evening, slim and straight, and taller by half a head than your

companions, in the lamp-lit room where the children were playing

forfeits, and said, "There is not one boy here that DARES to kiss

ME!" Then you ran out on the dark porch, where the honeysuckle

vines grew up the tall, inane Corinthian pillars.

Did you blame the boy for following? And were you very angry,

indeed, about what happened,--until you broke out laughing at his

cravat, which had slipped around behind his ear? That was the

first time he ever noticed how much sweeter the honeysuckle smells

at night than in the day. It was his entrance examination in the

school of nature--human and otherwise. He felt that there was a

whole continent of newly discovered poetry within him, and

worshipped his Columbus disguised in curls. Your boy is your true

idealist, after all, although (or perhaps because) he is still

uncivilised.

II.

The arrival of the rod, in four joints, with an extra tip, a brass

reel, and the other luxuries for which a true angler would

willingly exchange the necessaries of life, marked a new epoch in

the boy's career. At the uplifting of that wand, as if it had been

in the hand of another Moses, the waters of infancy rolled back,

and the way was opened into the promised land, whither the tyrant

nurses, with all their proud array of baby-chariots, could not

follow. The way was open, but not by any means dry. One of the

first events in the dispensation of the rod was the purchase of a

pair of high rubber boots. Inserted in this armour of modern

infantry, and transfigured with delight, the boy clumped through

all the little rivers within a circuit of ten miles from Caldwell,

and began to learn by parental example the yet unmastered art of

complete angling.

But because some of the streams were deep and strong, and his legs

were short and slender, and his ambition was even taller than his

boots, the father would sometimes take him up pickaback, and wade

along carefully through the perilous places--which are often, in

this world, the very places one longs to fish in. So, in your

remembrance, you can see the little rubber boots sticking out under

the father's arms, and the rod projecting over his head, and the

bait dangling down unsteadily into the deep holes, and the

delighted boy hooking and playing and basketing his trout high in

the air. How many of our best catches in life are made from some

one else's shoulders!

From this summer the whole earth became to the boy, as Tennyson

describes the lotus country, "a land of streams." In school-days

and in town he acknowledged the sway of those mysterious and

irresistible forces which produce tops at one season, and marbles

at another, and kites at another, and bind all boyish hearts to

play mumble-the-peg at the due time more certainly than the stars

are bound to their orbits. But when vacation came, with its annual

exodus from the city, there was only one sign in the zodiac, and

that was Pisces.

No country seemed to him tolerable without trout, and no landscape

beautiful unless enlivened by a young river. Among what delectable

mountains did those watery guides lead his vagrant steps, and with

what curious, mixed, and sometimes profitable company did they make

him familiar!

There was one exquisite stream among the Alleghanies, called

Lycoming Creek, beside which the family spent a summer in a

decadent inn, kept by a tremulous landlord who was always sitting

on the steps of the porch, and whose most memorable remark was that

he had "a misery in his stomach." This form of speech amused the

boy, but he did not in the least comprehend it. It was the

description of an unimaginable experience in a region which was as

yet known to him only as the seat of pleasure. He did not

understand how any one could be miserable when he could catch trout

from his own dooryard.

The big creek, with its sharp turns from side to side of the

valley, its hemlock-shaded falls in the gorge, and its long, still

reaches in the "sugar-bottom," where the maple-trees grew as if in

an orchard, and the superfluity of grasshoppers made the trout fat

and dainty, was too wide to fit the boy. But nature keeps all

sizes in her stock, and a smaller stream, called Rocky Run, came

tumbling down opposite the inn, as if made to order for juvenile

use.

How well you can follow it, through the old pasture overgrown with

alders, and up past the broken-down mill-dam and the crumbling

sluice, into the mountain-cleft from which it leaps laughing! The

water, except just after a rain-storm, is as transparent as glass--

old-fashioned window-glass, I mean, in small panes, with just a

tinge of green in it, like the air in a grove of young birches.

Twelve feet down in the narrow chasm below the falls, where the

water is full of tiny bubbles, like Apollinaris, you can see the

trout poised, with their heads up-stream, motionless, but quivering

a little, as if they were strung on wires.

The bed of the stream has been scooped out of the solid rock. Here

and there banks of sand have been deposited, and accumulations of

loose stone disguise the real nature of the channel. Great

boulders have been rolled down the alleyway and left where they

chanced to stick; the stream must get around them or under them as

best it can. But there are other places where everything has been

swept clean; nothing remains but the primitive strata, and the

flowing water merrily tickles the bare ribs of mother earth.

Whirling stones, in the spring floods, have cut well-holes in the

rock, as round and even as if they had been made with a drill, and

sometimes you can see the very stone that sunk the well lying at

the bottom. There are long, straight, sloping troughs through

which the water runs like a mill-race. There are huge basins into

which the water rumbles over a ledge, as if some one were pouring

it very steadily out of a pitcher, and from which it glides away

without a ripple, flowing over a smooth pavement of rock which

shelves down from the shallow foot to the deep head of the pool.

The boy wonders how far he dare wade out along that slippery floor.

The water is within an inch of his boot-tops now. But the slope

seems very even, and just beyond his reach a good fish is rising.

Only one step more, and then, like the wicked man in the psalm, his

feet begin to slide. Slowly, and standing bolt upright, with the

rod held high above his head, as if it must on no account get wet,

he glides forward up to his neck in the ice-cold bath, gasping with

amazement. There have been other and more serious situations in

life into which, unless I am mistaken, you have made an equally

unwilling and embarrassed entrance, and in which you have been

surprised to find yourself not only up to your neck, but over,--and

you are a lucky man if you have had the presence of mind to stand

still for a moment, before wading out, and make sure at least of

the fish that tempted you into your predicament.

But Rocky Run, they say, exists no longer. It has been blasted by

miners out of all resemblance to itself, and bewitched into a dingy

water-power to turn wheels for the ugly giant, Trade. It is only

in the valley of remembrance that its current still flows like

liquid air; and only in that country that you can still see the

famous men who came and went along the banks of the Lyocoming when

the boy was there.

There was Collins, who was a wondrous adept at "daping, dapping, or

dibbling" with a grasshopper, and who once brought in a string of

trout which he laid out head to tail on the grass before the house

in a line of beauty forty-seven feet long. A mighty bass voice had

this Collins also, and could sing, "Larboard Watch, Ahoy!" "Down in

a Coal-Mine," and other profound ditties in a way to make all the

glasses on the table jingle; but withal, as you now suspect, rather

a fishy character, and undeserving of the unqualified respect which

the boy had for him. And there was Dr. Romsen, lean, satirical,

kindly, a skilful though reluctant physician, who regarded it as a

personal injury if any one in the party fell sick in summer time;

and a passionately unsuccessful hunter, who would sit all night in

the crotch of a tree beside an alleged deer-lick, and come home

perfectly satisfied if he had heard a hedgehog grunt. It was he

who called attention to the discrepancy between the boy's appetite

and his size by saying loudly at a picnic, "I wouldn't grudge you

what you eat, my boy, if I could only see that it did you any

good,"--which remark was not forgiven until the doctor redeemed his

reputation by pronouncing a serious medical opinion, before a

council of mothers, to the effect that it did not really hurt a boy

to get his feet wet. That was worthy of Galen in his most inspired

moment. And there was hearty, genial Paul Merit, whose mere

company was an education in good manners, and who could eat eight

hard-boiled eggs for supper without ruffling his equanimity; and

the tall, thin, grinning Major, whom an angry Irishwoman once

described as "like a comb, all back and teeth;" and many more were

the comrades of the boy's father, all of whom he admired, (and

followed when they would let him,) but none so much as the father

himself, because he was the wisest, kindest, and merriest of all

that merry crew, now dispersed to the uttermost parts of the earth

and beyond.

Other streams played a part in the education of that happy boy: the

Kaaterskill, where there had been nothing but the ghosts of trout

for the last thirty years, but where the absence of fish was almost

forgotten in the joy of a first introduction to Dickens, one very

showery day, when dear old Ned Mason built a smoky fire in a cave

below Haines's Falls, and, pulling The Old Curiosity Shop out of

his pocket, read aloud about Little Nell until the tears ran down

the cheeks of reader and listener--the smoke was so thick, you

know: and the Neversink, which flows through John Burroughs's

country, and past one house in particular, perched on a high bluff,

where a very dreadful old woman come out and throws stones at "city

fellers fishin' through her land" (as if any one wanted to touch

her land! It was the water that ran over it, you see, that carried

the fish with it, and they were not hers at all): and the stream at

Healing Springs, in the Virginia mountains, where the medicinal

waters flow down into a lovely wild brook without injuring the

health of the trout in the least, and where the only drawback to

the angler's happiness is the abundance of rattlesnakes--but a boy

does not mind such things as that; he feels as if he were immortal.

Over all these streams memory skips lightly, and strikes a trail

through the woods to the Adirondacks, where the boy made his first

acquaintance with navigable rivers,--that is to say, rivers which

are traversed by canoes and hunting-skiffs, but not yet defiled by

steamboats,--and slept, or rather lay awake, for the first time on

a bed of balsam-boughs in a tent.

III.

The promotion from all-day picnics to a two weeks' camping-trip is

like going from school to college. By this time a natural process

of evolution has raised the first rod to something lighter and more

flexible,--a fly-rod, so to speak, but not a bigoted one,--just a

serviceable, unprejudiced article, not above using any kind of bait

that may be necessary to catch the fish. The father has received

the new title of "governor," indicating not less, but more

authority, and has called in new instructors to carry on the boy's

education: real Adirondack guides--old Sam Dunning and one-eyed

Enos, the last and laziest of the Saranac Indians. Better men will

be discovered for later trips, but none more amusing, and none

whose woodcraft seems more wonderful than that of this queerly

matched team, as they make the first camp in a pelting rain-storm

on the shore of Big Clear Pond. The pitching of the tents is a

lesson in architecture, the building of the camp-fire a victory

over damp nature, and the supper of potatoes and bacon and fried

trout a veritable triumph of culinary art.

At midnight the rain is pattering persistently on the canvas; the

fronts flaps are closed and tied together; the lingering fire

shines through them, and sends vague shadows wavering up and down:

the governor is rolled up in his blankets, sound asleep. It is a

very long night for the boy.

What is that rustling noise outside the tent? Probably some small

creature, a squirrel or a rabbit. Rabbit stew would be good for

breakfast. But it sounds louder now, almost loud enough to be a

fox,--there are no wolves left in the Adirondacks, or at least only

a very few. That is certainly quite a heavy footstep prowling

around the provision-box. Could it be a panther,--they step very

softly for their size,--or a bear perhaps? Sam Dunning told about

catching one in a trap just below here. (Ah, my boy, you will soon

learn that there is no spot in all the forests created by a

bountiful Providence so poor as to be without its bear story.)

Where was the rifle put? There it is, at the foot of the tent-

pole. Wonder if it is loaded?

"Waugh-ho! Waugh-ho-o-o-o!"

The boy springs from his blankets like a cat, and peeps out between

the tent-flaps. There sits Enos, in the shelter of a leaning tree

by the fire, with his head thrown back and a bottle poised at his

mouth. His lonely eye is cocked up at a great horned owl on the

branch above him. Again the sudden voice breaks out:

"Whoo! whoo! whoo cooks for you all?"

Enos puts the bottle down, with a grunt, and creeps off to his

tent.

"De debbil in dat owl," he mutters. "How he know I cook for dis

camp? How he know 'bout dat bottle? Ugh!"

There are hundreds of pictures that flash into light as the boy

goes on his course, year after year, through the woods. There is

the luxurious camp on Tupper's Lake, with its log cabins in the

spruce-grove, and its regiment of hungry men who ate almost a deer

a day; and there is the little bark shelter on the side of Mount

Marcy, where the governor and the boy, with baskets full of trout

from the Opalescent River, are spending the night, with nothing but

a fire to keep them warm. There is the North Bay at Moosehead,

with Joe La Croix (one more Frenchman who thinks he looks like

Napoleon) posing on the rocks beside his canoe, and only reconciled

by his vanity to the wasteful pastime of taking photographs while

the big fish are rising gloriously out at the end of the point.

There is the small spring-hole beside the Saranac River, where

Pliny Robbins and the boy caught twenty-three noble trout, weighing

from one to three pounds apiece, in the middle of a hot August

afternoon, and hid themselves in the bushes when ever they heard a

party coming down the river, because they did not care to attract

company; and there are the Middle Falls, where the governor stood

on a long spruce log, taking two-pound fish with the fly, and

stepping out at every cast a little nearer to the end of the log,

until it slowly tipped with him, and he settled down into the

river.

Among such scenes as these the boy pursued his education, learning

many things that are not taught in colleges; learning to take the

weather as it comes, wet or dry, and fortune as it falls, good or

bad; learning that a meal which is scanty fare for one becomes a

banquet for two--provided the other is the right person; learning

that there is some skill in everything, even in digging bait, and

that what is called luck consists chiefly in having your tackle in

good order; learning that a man can be just as happy in a log

shanty as in a brownstone mansion, and that the very best pleasures

are those that do not leave a bad taste in the mouth. And in all

this the governor was his best teacher and his closest comrade.

Dear governor, you have gone out of the wilderness now, and your

steps will be no more beside these remembered little rivers--no

more, forever and forever. You will not come in sight around any

bend of this clear Swiftwater stream where you made your last cast;

your cheery voice will never again ring out through the deepening

twilight where you are lingering for your disciple to catch up with

you; he will never again hear you call: "Hallo, my boy! What luck?

Time to go home!" But there is a river in the country where you

have gone, is there not?--a river with trees growing all along it--

evergreen trees; and somewhere by those shady banks, within sound

of clear running waters, I think you will be dreaming and waiting

for your boy, if he follows the trail that you have shown him even

to the end.

AMPERSAND

It is not the walking merely, it is keeping yourself in tune for a

walk, in the spiritual and bodily condition in which you can find

entertainment and exhilaration in so simple and natural a pastime.

You are eligible to any good fortune when you are in a condition to

enjoy a walk. When the air and water taste sweet to you, how much

else will taste sweet! When the exercise of your limbs affords you

pleasure, and the play of your senses upon the various objects and

shows of Nature quickens and stimulates your spirit, your relation

to the world and to yourself is what it should be,--simple, and

direct, and wholesome."--JOHN BURROUGHS: Pepacton.

The right to the name of Ampersand, like the territory of Gaul in

those Commentaries which Julius Caesar wrote for the punishment of

schoolboys, is divided into three parts. It belongs to a mountain,

and a lake, and a little river.

The mountain stands in the heart of the Adirondack country, just

near enough to the thoroughfare of travel for thousands of people

to see it every year, and just far enough from the beaten track to

be unvisited except by a very few of the wise ones, who love to

turn aside. Behind the mountain is the lake, which no lazy man has

ever seen. Out of the lake flows the stream, winding down a long,

untrodden forest valley, to join the Stony Creek waters and empty

into the Raquette River.

Which of the three Ampersands has the prior claim to the name, I

cannot tell. Philosophically speaking, the mountain ought to be

regarded as the head of the family, because it was undoubtedly

there before the others. And the lake was probably the next on the

ground, because the stream is its child. But man is not strictly

just in his nomenclature; and I conjecture that the little river,

the last-born of the three, was the first to be christened

Ampersand, and then gave its name to its parent and grand-parent.

It is such a crooked stream, so bent and curved and twisted upon

itself, so fond of turning around unexpected corners and sweeping

away in great circles from its direct course, that its first

explorers christened it after the eccentric supernumerary of the

alphabet which appears in the old spelling-books as &--and per se,

and.

But in spite of this apparent subordination to the stream in the

matter of a name, the mountain clearly asserts its natural

authority. It stands up boldly; and not only its own lake, but at

least three others, the Lower Saranac, Round Lake, and Lonesome

Pond, lie at its foot and acknowledge its lordship. When the cloud

is on its brow, they are dark. When the sunlight strikes it, they

smile.

Wherever you may go over the waters of these lakes you shall see

Mount Ampersand looking down at you, and saying quietly, "This is

my domain."

I never look at a mountain which asserts itself in this fashion

without desiring to stand on the top of it. If one can reach the

summit, one becomes a sharer in the dominion. The difficulties in

the way only add to the zest of the victory. Every mountain is,

rightly considered, an invitation to climb. And as I was resting

for a month one summer at Bartlett's, Ampersand challenged me

daily.

Did you know Bartlett's in its palmy time? It was the homeliest,

quaintest, coziest place in the Adirondacks. Away back in the

ante-bellum days Virgil Bartlett had come into the woods, and built

his house on the bank of the Saranac River, between the Upper

Saranac and Round Lake. It was then the only dwelling within a

circle of many miles. The deer and bear were in the majority. At

night one could sometimes hear the scream of the panther or the

howling of wolves. But soon the wilderness began to wear the

traces of a conventional smile. The desert blossomed a little--if

not as the rose, at least as the gilly-flower. Fields were

cleared, gardens planted; half a dozen log cabins were scattered

along the river; and the old house, having grown slowly and

somewhat irregularly for twenty years, came out, just before the

time of which I write, in a modest coat of paint and a broad-

brimmed piazza. But Virgil himself, the creator of the oasis--well

known of hunters and fishermen, dreaded of lazy guides and

quarrelsome lumbermen,--"Virge," the irascible, kind-hearted,

indefatigable, was there no longer. He had made his last clearing,

and fought his last fight; done his last favour to a friend, and

thrown his last adversary out of the tavern door. His last log had

gone down the river. His camp-fire had burned out. Peace to his

ashes. His wife, who had often played the part of Abigail toward

travellers who had unconsciously incurred the old man's mistrust,

now reigned in his stead; and there was great abundance of maple-

syrup on every man's flapjack.

The charm of Bartlett's for the angler was the stretch of rapid

water in front of the house. The Saranac River, breaking from its

first resting-place in the Upper Lake, plunged down through a great

bed of rocks, making a chain of short falls and pools and rapids,

about half a mile in length. Here, in the spring and early summer,

the speckled trout--brightest and daintiest of all fish that swim--

used to be found in great numbers. As the season advanced, they

moved away into the deep water of the lakes. But there were always

a few stragglers left, and I have taken them in the rapids at the

very end of August. What could be more delightful than to spend an

hour or two, in the early morning or evening of a hot day, in

wading this rushing stream, and casting the fly on its clear

waters? The wind blows softly down the narrow valley, and the

trees nod from the rocks above you. The noise of the falls makes

constant music in your ears. The river hurries past you, and yet

it is never gone.

The same foam-flakes seem to be always gliding downward, the same

spray dashing over the stones, the same eddy coiling at the edge of

the pool. Send your fly in under those cedar branches, where the

water swirls around by that old log. Now draw it up toward the

foam. There is a sudden gleam of dull gold in the white water.

You strike too soon. Your line comes back to you. In a current

like this, a fish will almost always hook himself. Try it again.

This time he takes the fly fairly, and you have him. It is a good

fish, and he makes the slender rod bend to the strain. He sulks

for a moment as if uncertain what to do, and then with a rush darts

into the swiftest part of the current. You can never stop him

there. Let him go. Keep just enough pressure on him to hold the

hook firm, and follow his troutship down the stream as if he were a

salmon. He slides over a little fall, gleaming through the foam,

and swings around in the next pool. Here you can manage him more

easily; and after a few minutes' brilliant play, a few mad dashes

for the current, he comes to the net, and your skilful guide lands

him with a quick, steady sweep of the arm. The scales credit him

with an even pound, and a better fish than this you will hardly

take here in midsummer.

"On my word, master," says the appreciative Venator, in Walton's

Angler, "this is a gallant trout; what shall we do with him?" And

honest Piscator, replies: "Marry! e'en eat him to supper; we'll go

to my hostess from whence we came; she told me, as I was going out

of door, that my brother Peter, [and who is this but Romeyn of

Keeseville?] a good angler and a cheerful companion, had sent word

he would lodge there tonight, and bring a friend with him. My

hostess has two beds, and I know you and I have the best; we'll

rejoice with my brother Peter and his friend, tell tales, or sing

ballads, or make a catch, or find some harmless sport to content

us, and pass away a little time without offence to God or man."

Ampersand waited immovable while I passed many days in such

innocent and healthful pleasures as these, until the right day came

for the ascent. Cool, clean, and bright, the crystal morning

promised a glorious noon, and the mountain almost seemed to beckon

us to come up higher. The photographic camera and a trustworthy

lunch were stowed away in the pack-basket. The backboard was

adjusted at a comfortable angle in the stern seat of our little

boat. The guide held the little craft steady while I stepped into

my place; then he pushed out into the stream, and we went swiftly

down toward Round Lake.

A Saranac boat is one of the finest things that the skill of man

has ever produced under the inspiration of the wilderness. It is a

frail shell, so light that a guide can carry it on his shoulders

with ease, but so dexterously fashioned that it rides the heaviest

waves like a duck, and slips through the water as if by magic. You

can travel in it along the shallowest rivers and across the

broadest lakes, and make forty or fifty miles a day, if you have a

good guide.

Everything depends, in the Adirondacks, as in so many other regions

of life, upon your guide. If he is selfish, or surly, or stupid,

you will have a bad time. But if he is an Adirondacker of the best

old-fashioned type,--now unhappily growing more rare from year to

year,--you will find him an inimitable companion, honest, faithful,

skilful and cheerful. He is as independent as a prince, and the

gilded youths and finicking fine ladies who attempt to patronise

him are apt to make but a sorry show before his solid and

undisguised contempt. But deal with him man to man, and he will

give you a friendly, loyal service which money cannot buy, and

teach you secrets of woodcraft and lessons in plain, self-reliant

manhood more valuable than all the learning of the schools. Such a

guide was mine, rejoicing in the Scriptural name of Hosea, but

commonly called, in brevity and friendliness, "Hose."

As we entered Round Lake on this fair morning, its surface was as

smooth and shining as a mirror. It was too early yet for the tide

of travel which sends a score of boats up and down this

thoroughfare every day; and from shore to shore the water was

unruffled, except by a flock of sheldrakes which had been feeding

near Plymouth Rock, and now went skittering off into Weller Bay

with a motion between flying and swimming, leaving a long wake of

foam behind them.

At such a time as this you can see the real colour of these

Adirondack lakes. It is not blue, as romantic writers so often

describe it, nor green, like some of those wonderful Swiss lakes;

although of course it reflects the colour of the trees along the

shore; and when the wind stirs it, it gives back the hue of the

sky, blue when it is clear, gray when the clouds are gathering, and

sometimes as black as ink under the shadow of storm. But when it

is still, the water itself is like that river which one of the

poets has described as

"Flowing with a smooth brown current."

And in this sheet of burnished bronze the mountains and islands

were reflected perfectly, and the sun shone back from it, not in

broken gleams or a wide lane of light, but like a single ball of

fire, moving before us as we moved.

But stop! What is that dark speck on the water, away down toward

Turtle Point? It has just the shape and size of a deer's head. It

seems to move steadily out into the lake. There is a little

ripple, like a wake, behind it. Hose turns to look at it, and then

sends the boat darting in that direction with long, swift strokes.

It is a moment of pleasant excitement, and we begin to conjecture

whether the deer is a buck or a doe, and whose hounds have driven

it in. But when Hose turns to look again, he slackens his stroke,

and says: "I guess we needn't to hurry; he won't get away. It's

astonishin' what a lot of fun a man can get in the course of a

natural life a-chasm' chumps of wood."

We landed on a sand beach at the mouth of a little stream, where a

blazed tree marked the beginning of the Ampersand trail. This line

through the forest was made years ago by that ardent sportsman and

lover of the Adirondacks, Dr. W. W. Ely, of Rochester. Since that

time it has been shortened and improved a little by other

travellers, and also not a little blocked and confused by the

lumbermen and the course of Nature. For when the lumbermen go into

the woods, they cut roads in every direction, leading nowhither,

and the unwary wanderer is thereby led aside from the right way,

and entangled in the undergrowth. And as for Nature, she is

entirely opposed to continuance of paths through her forest. She

covers them with fallen leaves, and hides them with thick bushes.

She drops great trees across them, and blots then out with

windfalls. But the blazed line--a succession of broad axe-marks on

the trunks of the trees, just high enough to catch the eye on a

level--cannot be so easily obliterated, and this, after all, is the

safest guide through the woods.

Our trail led us at first through a natural meadow, overgrown with

waist-high grass, and very spongy to the tread. Hornet-haunted

also was this meadow, and therefore no place for idle dalliance or

unwary digression, for the sting of the hornet is one of the

saddest and most humiliating surprises of this mortal life.

Then through a tangle of old wood-roads my guide led me safely, and

we struck one of the long ridges which slope gently from the lake

to the base of the mountain. Here walking was comparatively easy,

for in the hard-wood timber there is little underbrush. The

massive trunks seemed like pillars set to uphold the level roof of

green. Great yellow birches, shaggy with age, stretched their

knotted arms high above us; sugar-maples stood up straight and

proud under their leafy crowns; and smooth beeches--the most

polished and parklike of all the forest trees--offered

opportunities for the carving of lovers' names in a place where few

lovers ever come.

The woods were quiet. It seemed as if all living creatures had

deserted them. Indeed, if you have spent much time in our Northern

forests, you must have often wondered at the sparseness of life,

and felt a sense of pity for the apparent loneliness of the

squirrel that chatters at you as you pass, or the little bird that

hops noiselessly about in the thickets. The midsummer noontide is

an especially silent time. The deer are asleep in some wild

meadow. The partridge has gathered her brood for their midday nap.

The squirrels are perhaps counting over their store of nuts in a

hollow tree, and the hermit-thrush spares his voice until evening.

The woods are close--not cool and fragrant as the foolish romances

describe them--but warm and still; for the breeze which sweeps

across the hilltop and ruffles the lake does not penetrate into

these shady recesses, and therefore all the inhabitants take the

noontide as their hour of rest. Only the big woodpecker--he of the

scarlet head and mighty bill--is indefatigable, and somewhere

unseen is "tapping the hollow beech-tree," while a wakeful little

bird,--I guess it is the black-throated green warbler,--prolongs

his dreamy, listless ditty,--'te-de-terit-sca,--'te-de-us--wait.

After about an hour of easy walking, our trail began to ascend more

sharply. We passed over the shoulder of a ridge and around the

edge of a fire-slash, and then we had the mountain fairly before

us. Not that we could see anything of it, for the woods still shut

us in, but the path became very steep, and we knew that it was a

straight climb; not up and down and round about did this most

uncompromising trail proceed, but right up, in a direct line for

the summit.

Now this side of Ampersand is steeper than any Gothic roof I have

ever seen, and withal very much encumbered with rocks and ledges

and fallen trees. There were places where we had to haul ourselves

up by roots and branches, and places where we had to go down on our

hands and knees to crawl under logs. It was breathless work, but

not at all dangerous or difficult. Every step forward was also a

step upward; and as we stopped to rest for a moment, we could see

already glimpses of the lake below us. But at these I did not much

care to look, for I think it is a pity to spoil the surprise of a

grand view by taking little snatches of it beforehand. It is

better to keep one's face set to the mountain, and then, coming out

from the dark forest upon the very summit, feel the splendour of

the outlook flash upon one like a revelation.

The character of the woods through which we were now passing was

entirely different from those of the lower levels. On these steep

places the birch and maple will not grow, or at least they occur

but sparsely. The higher slopes and sharp ridges of the mountains

are always covered with soft-wood timber. Spruce and hemlock and

balsam strike their roots among the rocks, and find a hidden

nourishment. They stand close together; thickets of small trees

spring up among the large ones; from year to year the great trunks

are falling one across another, and the undergrowth is thickening

around them, until a spruce forest seems to be almost impassable.

The constant rain of needles and the crumbling of the fallen trees

form a rich, brown mould, into which the foot sinks noiselessly.

Wonderful beds of moss, many feet in thickness, and softer than

feathers, cover the rocks and roots. There are shadows never

broken by the sun, and dark, cool springs of icy water hidden away

in the crevices. You feel a sense of antiquity here which you can

never feel among the maples and birches. Longfellow was right when

he filled his forest primeval with "murmuring pines and hemlocks."

The higher one climbs, the darker and gloomier and more rugged the

vegetation becomes. The pine-trees soon cease to follow you; the

hemlocks disappear, and the balsams can go no farther. Only the

hardy spruce keeps on bravely, rough and stunted, with branches

matted together and pressed down flat by the weight of the winter's

snow, until finally, somewhere about the level of four thousand

feet above the sea, even this bold climber gives out, and the

weather-beaten rocks of the summit are clad only with mosses and

Alpine plants.

Thus it is with mountains, as perhaps with men, a mark of superior

dignity to be naturally bald.

Ampersand, falling short by a thousand feet of the needful height,

cannot claim this distinction. But what Nature has denied, human

labour has supplied. Under the direction of the Adirondack Survey,

some years ago, several acres of trees were cut from the summit;

and when we emerged, after the last sharp scramble, upon the very

crest of the mountain, we were not shut in by a dense thicket, but

stood upon a bare ridge of granite in the centre of a ragged

clearing.

I shut my eyes for a moment, drew a few long breaths of the

glorious breeze, and then looked out upon a wonder and a delight

beyond description.

A soft, dazzling splendour filled the air. Snowy banks and drifts

of cloud were floating slowly over a wide and wondrous land. Vast

sweeps of forest, shining waters, mountains near and far, the

deepest green and the palest blue, changing colours and glancing

lights, and all so silent, so strange, so far away, that it seemed

like the landscape of a dream. One almost feared to speak, lest it

should vanish.

Right below us the Lower Saranac and Lonesome Pond, Round Lake and

the Weller Ponds, were spread out like a map. Every point and

island was clearly marked. We could follow the course of the

Saranac River in all its curves and windings, and see the white

tents of the hay-makers on the wild meadows. Far away to the

northeast stretched the level fields of Bloomingdale. But westward

all was unbroken wilderness, a great sea of woods as far as the eye

could reach. And how far it can reach from a height like this!

What a revelation of the power of sight! That faint blue outline

far in the north was Lyon Mountain, nearly thirty miles away as the

crow flies. Those silver gleams a little nearer were the waters of

St. Regis. The Upper Saranac was displayed in all its length and

breadth, and beyond it the innumerable waters of Fish Creek were

tangled among the dark woods. The long ranges of the hills about

the Jordan bounded the western horizon, and on the southwest Big

Tupper Lake was sleeping at the base of Mount Morris. Looking past

the peak of Stony Creek Mountain, which rose sharp and distinct in

a line with Ampersand, we could trace the path of the Raquette

River from the distant waters of Long Lake down through its far-

stretched valley, and catch here and there a silvery link of its

current.

But when we turned to the south and east, how wonderful and how

different was the view! Here was no widespread and smiling

landscape with gleams of silver scattered through it, and soft blue

haze resting upon its fading verge, but a wild land of mountains,

stern, rugged, tumultuous, rising one beyond another like the waves

of a stormy ocean,--Ossa piled upin Pelion,--Mcintyre's sharp peak,

and the ragged crest of the Gothics, and, above all, Marcy's dome-

like head, raised just far enough above the others to assert his

royal right as monarch of the Adirondacks.

But grandest of all, as seen from this height, was Mount Seward,--a

solemn giant of a mountain, standing apart from the others, and

looking us full in the face. He was clothed from base to summit in

a dark, unbroken robe of forest. Ou-kor-lah, the Indians called

him--the Great Eye; and he seemed almost to frown upon us in

defiance. At his feet, so straight below us that it seemed almost

as if we could cast a stone into it, lay the wildest and most

beautiful of all the Adirondack waters--Ampersand Lake.

On its shore, some five-and-twenty years ago, the now almost

forgotten Adirondack Club had their shanty--the successor of "the

Philosophers' Camp" on Follensbee Pond. Agassiz, Appleton, Norton,

Emerson, Lowell, Hoar, Gray, John Holmes, and Stillman, were among

the company who made their resting-place under the shadow of Mount

Seward. They had bought a tract of forest land completely

encircling the pond, cut a rough road to it through the woods, and

built a comfortable log cabin, to which they purposed to return

summer after summer. But the civil war broke out, with all its

terrible excitement and confusion of hurrying hosts: the club

existed but for two years, and the little house in the wilderness

was abandoned. In 1878, when I spent three weeks at Ampersand, the

cabin was in ruins, and surrounded by an almost impenetrable growth

of bushes. The only philosophers to be seen were a family of what

the guides quaintly call "quill pigs." The roof had fallen to the

ground; raspberry-bushes thrust themselves through the yawning

crevices between the logs; and in front of the sunken door-sill lay

a rusty, broken iron stove, like a dismantled altar on which the

fire had gone out forever.

After we had feasted upon the view as long as we dared, counted the

lakes and streams, and found that we could see without a glass more

than thirty, and recalled the memories of "good times" which came

to us from almost every point of the compass, we unpacked the

camera, and proceeded to take some pictures.

If you are a photographer, and have anything of the amateur's

passion for your art, you will appreciate my pleasure and my

anxiety. Never before, so far as I knew, had a camera been set up

on Ampersand. I had but eight plates with me. The views were all

very distant and all at a downward angle. The power of the light

at this elevation was an unknown quantity. And the wind was

sweeping vigorously across the open summit of the mountain. I put

in my smallest stop, and prepared for short exposures.

My instrument was a thing called a Tourograph, which differs from

most other cameras in having the plate-holder on top of the box.

The plates are dropped into a groove below, and then moved into

focus, after which the cap is removed and the exposure made.

I set my instrument for Ampersand Pond, sighted the picture through

the ground glass, and measured the focus. Then I waited for a

quiet moment, dropped the plate, moved it carefully forward to the

proper mark, and went around to take off the cap. I found that I

already had it in my hand, and the plate had been exposed for about

thirty seconds with a sliding focus!

I expostulated with myself. I said: "You are excited; you are

stupid; you are unworthy of the name of photographer. Light-

writer! You ought to write with a whitewash-brush!" The reproof

was effectual, and from that moment all went well. The plates

dropped smoothly, the camera was steady, the exposure was correct.

Six good pictures were made, to recall, so far as black and white

could do it, the delights of that day.

It has been my good luck to climb many of the peaks of the

Adirondacks--Dix, the Dial, Hurricane, the Giant of the Valley,

Marcy, and Whiteface--but I do not think the outlook from any of

them is so wonderful and lovely as that from little Ampersand: and

I reckon among my most valuable chattels the plates of glass on

which the sun has traced for me (who cannot draw) the outlines of

that loveliest landscape.

The downward journey was swift. We halted for an hour or two

beside a trickling spring, a few rods below the summit, to eat our

lunch. Then, jumping, running, and sometimes sliding, we made the

descent, passed in safety by the dreaded lair of the hornet, and

reached Bartlett's as the fragrance of the evening pancake was

softly diffused through the twilight. Mark that day, Memory, with

a double star in your catalogue!

A HANDFUL OF HEATHER

"Scotland is the home of romance because it is the home of Scott,

Burns, Black, Macdonald, Stevenson, and Barrie--and of thousands of

men like that old Highlander in kilts on the tow-path, who loves

what they have written. I would wager he has a copy of Burns in

his sporran, and has quoted him half a dozen times to the grim Celt

who is walking with him. Those old boys don't read for excitement

or knowledge, but because they love their land and their people and

their religion--and their great writers simply express their

emotions for them in words they can understand. You and I come

over here, with thousands of our countrymen, to borrow their

emotions."--ROBERT BRIDGES: Overheard in Arcady.

My friend the Triumphant Democrat, fiercest of radicals and kindest

of men, expresses his scorn for monarchical institutions (and his

invincible love for his native Scotland) by tenanting, summer after

summer, a famous castle among the heathery Highlands. There he

proclaims the most uncompromising Americanism in a speech that

grows more broadly Scotch with every week of his emancipation from

the influence of the clipped, commercial accent of New York, and

casts contempt on feudalism by playing the part of lord of the

manor to such a perfection of high-handed beneficence that the

people of the glen are all become his clansmen, and his gentle lady

would be the patron saint of the district--if the republican

theology of Scotland could only admit saints among the elect.

Every year he sends trophies of game to his friends across the sea--

birds that are as toothsome and wild-flavoured as if they had not

been hatched under the tyranny of the game-laws. He has a pleasant

trick of making them grateful to the imagination as well as to the

palate by packing them in heather. I'll warrant that Aaron's rod

bore no bonnier blossoms than these stiff little bushes--and none

more magical. For every time I take up a handful of them they

transport me to the Highlands, and send me tramping once more, with

knapsack and fishing-rod, over the braes and down the burns.

I.

BELL-HEATHER.

Some of my happiest meanderings in Scotland have been taken under

the lead of a book. Indeed, for travel in a strange country there

can be no better courier. Not a guide-book, I mean, but a real

book, and, by preference, a novel.

Fiction, like wine, tastes best in the place where it was grown.

And the scenery of a foreign land (including architecture, which is

artificial landscape) grows less dreamlike and unreal to our

perception when we people it with familiar characters from our

favourite novels. Even on a first journey we feel ourselves among

old friends. Thus to read Romola in Florence, and Les Miserables

in Paris, and Lorna Doone on Exmoor, and The Heart of Midlothian

in Edinburgh, and David Balfour in the Pass of Glencoe, and The

Pirate in the Shetland Isles, is to get a new sense of the

possibilities of life. All these things have I done with much

inward contentment; and other things of like quality have I yet

in store; as, for example, the conjunction of The Bonnie Brier-Bush

with Drumtochty, and The Little Minister with Thrums, and The

Raiders with Galloway. But I never expect to pass pleasanter

days than those I spent with A Princess of Thule among the Hebrides.

For then, to begin with, I was young; which is an unearned

increment of delight sure to be confiscated by the envious years

and never regained. But even youth itself was not to be compared

with the exquisite felicity of being deeply and desperately in love

with Sheila, the clear-eyed heroine of that charming book. In this

innocent passion my gray-haired comrades, Howard Crosby, the

Chancellor of the University of New York, and my father, an ex-

Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly, were ardent but

generous rivals.

How great is the joy and how fascinating the pursuit of such an

ethereal affection! It enlarges the heart without embarrassing the

conscience. It is a cup of pure gladness with no bitterness in its

dregs. It spends the present moment with a free hand, and yet

leaves no undesirable mortgage upon the future. King Arthur, the

founder of the Round Table, expressed a conviction, according to

Tennyson, that the most important element in a young knight's

education is "the maiden passion for a maid." Surely the safest

form in which this course in the curriculum may be taken is by

falling in love with a girl in a book. It is the only affair of

the kind into which a young fellow can enter without

responsibility, and out of which he can always emerge, when

necessary, without discredit. And as for the old fellow who still

keeps up this education of the heart, and worships his heroine with

the ardour of a John Ridd and the fidelity of a Henry Esmond, I

maintain that he is exempt from all the penalties of declining

years. The man who can love a girl in a book may be old, but never

aged.

So we sailed, lovers all three, among the Western Isles, and

whatever ship it was that carried us, her figurehead was always the

Princess Sheila. Along the ruffled blue waters of the sounds and

lochs that wind among the roots of unpronounceable mountains, and

past the dark hills of Skye, and through the unnumbered flocks of

craggy islets where the sea-birds nest, the spell of the sweet

Highland maid drew us, and we were pilgrims to the Ultima Thule

where she lived and reigned.

The Lewis, with its tail-piece, the Harris, is quite a sizable

island to be appended to such a country as Scotland. It is a

number of miles long, and another number of miles wide, and it has

a number of thousand inhabitants--I should say as many as three-

quarters of an inhabitant to the square mile--and the conditions of

agriculture and the fisheries are extremely interesting and

quarrelsome. All these I duly studied at the time, and reported in

a series of intolerably dull letters to the newspaper which

supplied a financial basis for my sentimental journey. They are

full of information; but I have been amused to note, after these

many years, how wide they steer of the true motive and interest of

the excursion. There is not even a hint of Sheila in any of them.

Youth, after all, is a shamefaced and secretive season; like the

fringed polygala, it hides its real blossom underground.

It was Sheila's dark-blue dress and sailor hat with the white

feather that we looked for as we loafed through the streets of

Stornoway, that quaint metropolis of the herring-trade, where

strings of fish alternated with boxes of flowers in the windows,

and handfuls of fish were spread upon the roofs to dry just as the

sliced apples are exposed upon the kitchen-sheds of New England in

September, and dark-haired women were carrying great creels of fish

on their shoulders, and groups of sunburned men were smoking among

the fishing-boats on the beach and talking about fish, and sea-

gulls were floating over the houses with their heads turning from

side to side and their bright eyes peering everywhere for

unconsidered trifles of fish, and the whole atmosphere of the

place, physical, mental, and moral, was pervaded with fish. It was

Sheila's soft, sing-song Highland speech that we heard through the

long, luminous twilight in the pauses of that friendly chat on the

balcony of the little inn where a good fortune brought us

acquainted with Sam Bough, the mellow Edinburgh painter. It was

Sheila's low sweet brow, and long black eyelashes, and tender blue

eyes, that we saw before us as we loitered over the open moorland,

a far-rolling sea of brown billows, reddened with patches of bell-

heather, and brightened here and there with little lakes lying wide

open to the sky. And were not these peat-cutters, with the big

baskets on their backs, walking in silhouette along the ridges, the

people that Sheila loved and tried to help; and were not these

crofters' cottages with thatched roofs, like beehives, blending

almost imperceptibly with the landscape, the dwellings into which

she planned to introduce the luxury of windows; and were not these

Standing Stones of Callernish, huge tombstones of a vanished

religion, the roofless temple from which the Druids paid their

westernmost adoration to the setting sun as he sank into the

Atlantic--was not this the place where Sheila picked the bunch of

wild flowers and gave it to her lover? There is nothing in

history, I am sure, half so real to us as some of the things in

fiction. The influence of an event upon our character is little

affected by considerations as to whether or not it ever happened.

There were three churches in Stornoway, all Presbyterian, of

course, and therefore full of pious emulation. The idea of

securing an American preacher for an August Sabbath seemed to fall

upon them simultaneously, and to offer the prospect of novelty

without too much danger. The brethren of the U. P. congregation,

being a trifle more gleg than the others, arrived first at the inn,

and secured the promise of a morning sermon from Chancellor Howard

Crosby. The session of the Free Kirk came in a body a little

later, and to them my father pledged himself for the evening sermon.

The senior elder of the Established Kirk, a snuff-taking man and

very deliberate, was the last to appear, and to his request for an

afternoon sermon there was nothing left to offer but the services

of the young probationer in theology. I could see that it struck

him as a perilous adventure. Questions about "the fundamentals"

glinted in his watery eye. He crossed and uncrossed his legs with

solemnity, and blew his nose so frequently in a huge red silk

handkerchief that it seemed like a signal of danger. At last he

unburdened himself of his hesitations.

"Ah'm not saying that the young man will not be orthodox--ahem!

But ye know, sir, in the Kirk, we are not using hymns, but just the

pure Psawms of Daffit, in the meetrical fairsion. And ye know,

sir, they are ferry tifficult in the reating, whatefer, for a young

man, and one that iss a stranger. And if his father will just be

coming with him in the pulpit, to see that nothing iss said amiss,

that will be ferry comforting to the congregation."

So the dear governor swallowed his laughter gravely and went surety

for his son. They appeared together in the church, a barnlike

edifice, with great galleries half-way between the floor and the

roof. Still higher up, the pulpit stuck like a swallow's nest

against the wall. The two ministers climbed the precipitous stair

and found themselves in a box so narrow that one must stand

perforce, while the other sat upon the only seat. In this "ride

and tie" fashion they went through the service. When it was time

to preach, the young man dropped the doctrines as discreetly as

possible upon the upturned countenances beneath him. I have

forgotten now what it was all about, but there was a quotation from

the Song of Solomon, ending with "Sweet is thy voice, and thy

countenance is comely." And when it came to that, the

probationer's eyes (if the truth must be told) went searching

through that sea of faces for one that should be familiar to his

heart, and to which he might make a personal application of the

Scripture passage--even the face of Sheila.

There are rivers in the Lewis, at least two of them, and on one of

these we had the offer of a rod for a day's fishing. Accordingly

we cast lots, and the lot fell upon the youngest, and I went forth

with a tall, red-legged gillie, to try for my first salmon. The

Whitewater came singing down out of the moorland into a rocky

valley, and there was a merry curl of air on the pools, and the

silver fish were leaping from the stream. The gillie handled the

big rod as if it had been a fairy's wand, but to me it was like a

giant's spear. It was a very different affair from fishing with

five ounces of split bamboo on a Long Island trout-pond. The

monstrous fly, like an awkward bird, went fluttering everywhere but

in the right direction. It was the mercy of Providence that

preserved the gillie's life. But he was very patient and

forbearing, leading me on from one pool to another, as I spoiled

the water and snatched the hook out of the mouth of rising fish,

until at last we found a salmon that knew even less about the

niceties of salmon-fishing than I did. He seized the fly firmly,

before I could pull it away, and then, in a moment, I found myself

attached to a creature with the strength of a whale and the agility

of a flying-fish. He led me rushing up and down the bank like a

madman. He played on the surface like a whirlwind, and sulked at

the bottom like a stone. He meditated, with ominous delay, in the

middle of the deepest pool, and then, darting across the river,

flung himself clean out of water and landed far up on the green

turf of the opposite shore. My heart melted like a snowflake in

the sea, and I thought that I had lost him forever. But he rolled

quietly back into the water with the hook still set in his nose. A

few minutes afterwards I brought him within reach of the gaff, and

my first salmon was glittering on the grass beside me.

Then I remembered that William Black had described this very fish

in A Princess of Thule. I pulled the book from my pocket, and,

lighting a pipe, sat down to read that delightful chapter over

again. The breeze played softly down the valley. The warm

sunlight was filled with the musical hum of insects and the murmur

of falling waters. I thought how much pleasanter it would have

been to learn salmon-fishing, as Black's hero did, from the Maid of

Borva, than from a red-headed gillie. But, then, his salmon, after

leaping across the stream, got away; whereas mine was safe. A man

cannot have everything in this world. I picked a spray of rosy

bell-heather from the bank of the river, and pressed it between the

leaves of the book in memory of Sheila.

II.

COMMON HEATHER.

It is not half as far from Albany to Aberdeen as it is from New

York to London. In fact, I venture to say that an American on foot

will find himself less a foreigner in Scotland than in any other

country in the Old World. There is something warm and hospitable--

if he knew the language well enough he would call it couthy--in the

greeting that he gets from the shepherd on the moor, and the

conversation that he holds with the farmer's wife in the stone

cottage, where he stops to ask for a drink of milk and a bit of

oat-cake. He feels that there must be a drop of Scotch somewhere

in his mingled blood, or at least that the texture of his thought

and feelings has been partly woven on a Scottish loom--perhaps the

Shorter Catechism, or Robert Burns's poems, or the romances of Sir

Walter Scott. At all events, he is among a kindred and

comprehending people. They do not speak English in the same way

that he does--through the nose---but they think very much more in

his mental dialect than the English do. They are independent and

wide awake, curious and full of personal interest. The wayside

mind in Inverness or Perth runs more to muscle and less to fat, has

more active vanity and less passive pride, is more inquisitive and

excitable and sympathetic--in short, to use a symbolist's

description, it is more apt to be red-headed--than in Surrey or

Somerset. Scotchmen ask more questions about America, but fewer

foolish ones. You will never hear them inquiring whether there is

any good bear-hunting in the neighbourhood of Boston, or whether

Shakespeare is much read in the States. They have a healthy

respect for our institutions, and have quite forgiven (if, indeed,

they ever resented) that little affair in 1776. They are all born

Liberals. When a Scotchman says he is a Conservative, it only

means that he is a Liberal with hesitations.

And yet in North Britain the American pedestrian will not find that

amused and somewhat condescending toleration for his peculiarities,

that placid willingness to make the best of all his vagaries of

speech and conduct, that he finds in South Britain. In an English

town you may do pretty much what you like on a Sunday, even to the

extent of wearing a billycock hat to church, and people will put up

with it from a countryman of Buffalo Bill and the Wild West Show.

But in a Scotch village, if you whistle in the street on a Lord's

Day, though it be a Moody and Sankey tune, you will be likely to

get, as I did, an admonition from some long-legged, grizzled elder:

"Young man, do ye no ken it's the Sawbath Day?"

I recognised the reproof of the righteous, an excellent oil which

doth not break the head, and took it gratefully at the old man's

hands. For did it not prove that he regarded me as a man and a

brother, a creature capable of being civilised and saved?

It was in the gray town of Dingwall that I had this bit of pleasant

correction, as I was on the way to a fishing tramp through

Sutherlandshire. This northwest corner of Great Britain is the

best place in the whole island for a modest and impecunious angler.

There are, or there were a few years ago, wild lochs and streams

which are still practically free, and a man who is content with

small things can pick up some very pretty sport from the highland

inns, and make a good basket of memorable experiences every week.

The inn at Lairg, overlooking the narrow waters of Loch Shin, was

embowered in honeysuckles, and full of creature comfort. But there

were too many other men with rods there to suit my taste. "The

feesh in this loch," said the boatman, "iss not so numerous ass the

feeshermen, but more wise. There iss not one of them that hass not

felt the hook, and they know ferry well what side of the fly has

the forkit tail."

At Altnaharra, in the shadow of Ben Clebrig, there was a cozy

little house with good fare, and abundant trout-fishing in Loch

Naver and Loch Meadie. It was there that I fell in with a

wandering pearl-peddler who gathered his wares from the mussels in

the moorland streams. They were not of the finest quality, these

Scotch pearls, but they had pretty, changeable colours of pink and

blue upon them, like the iridescent light that plays over the

heather in the long northern evenings. I thought it must be a hard

life for the man, wading day after day in the ice-cold water, and

groping among the coggly, sliddery stones for the shellfish, and

cracking open perhaps a thousand before he could find one pearl.

"Oh, yess," said be, "and it iss not an easy life, and I am not

saying that it will be so warm and dry ass liffing in a rich house.

But it iss the life that I am fit for, and I hef my own time and my

thoughts to mysel', and that is a ferry goot thing; and then, sir,

I haf found the Pearl of Great Price, and I think upon that day and

night."

Under the black, shattered peaks of Ben Laoghal, where I saw an

eagle poising day after day as if some invisible centripetal force

bound him forever to that small circle of air, there was a loch

with plenty of brown trout and a few salmo ferox; and down at

Tongue there was a little river where the sea-trout sometimes come

up with the tide.

Here I found myself upon the north coast, and took the road

eastward between the mountains and the sea. It was a beautiful

region of desolation. There were rocky glens cutting across the

road, and occasionally a brawling stream ran down to the salt

water, breaking the line of cliffs with a little bay and a half-

moon of yellow sand. The heather covered all the hills. There

were no trees, and but few houses. The chief signs of human labour

were the rounded piles of peat, and the square cuttings in the moor

marking the places where the subterranean wood-choppers had

gathered their harvests. The long straths were once cultivated,

and every patch of arable land had its group of cottages full of

children. The human harvest has always been the richest and most

abundant that is raised in the Highlands; but unfortunately the

supply exceeded the demand; and so the crofters were evicted, and

great flocks of sheep were put in possession of the land; and now

the sheep-pastures have been changed into deer-forests; and far and

wide along the valleys and across the hills there is not a trace of

habitation, except the heaps of stones and the clumps of straggling

bushes which mark the sites of lost homes. But what is one

country's loss is another country's gain. Canada and the United

States are infinitely the richer for the tough, strong, fearless,

honest men that were dispersed from these lonely straths to make

new homes across the sea.

It was after sundown when I reached the straggling village of

Melvich, and the long day's journey had left me weary. But the

inn, with its red-curtained windows, looked bright and reassuring.

Thoughts of dinner and a good bed comforted my spirit--prematurely.

For the inn was full. There were but five bedrooms and two

parlours. The gentlemen who had the neighbouring shootings

occupied three bedrooms and a parlour; the other two bedrooms had

just been taken by the English fishermen who had passed me in the

road an hour ago in the mail-coach (oh! why had I not suspected

that treacherous vehicle?); and the landlord and his wife assured

me, with equal firmness and sympathy, that there was not another

cot or pair of blankets in the house. I believed them, and was

sinking into despair when Sandy M'Kaye appeared on the scene as my

angel of deliverance. Sandy was a small, withered, wiry man,

dressed in rusty gray, with an immense white collar thrusting out

its points on either side of his chin, and a black stock climbing

over the top of it. I guessed from his speech that he had once

lived in the lowlands. He had hoped to be engaged as a gillie by

the shooting party, but had been disappointed. He had wanted to be

taken by the English fishermen, but another and younger man had

stepped in before him. Now Sandy saw in me his Predestinated

Opportunity, and had no idea of letting it post up the road that

night to the next village. He cleared his throat respectfully and

cut into the conversation.

"Ah'm thinkin' the gentleman micht find a coomfortaible lodgin' wi'

the weedow Macphairson a wee bittie doon the road. Her dochter is

awa' in Ameriky, an' the room is a verra fine room, an' it is a

peety to hae it stannin' idle, an' ye wudna mind the few steps to

and fro tae yir meals here, sir, wud ye? An' if ye 'ill gang wi'

me efter dinner, 'a 'll be prood to shoo ye the hoose."

So, after a good dinner with the English fishermen, Sandy piloted

me down the road through the thickening dusk. I remember a hoodie

crow flew close behind us with a choking, ghostly cough that

startled me. The Macpherson cottage was a snug little house of

stone, with fuchsias and roses growing in the front yard: and the

widow was a douce old lady, with a face like a winter apple in the

month of April, wrinkled, but still rosy. She was a little

doubtful about entertaining strangers, but when she heard I was

from America she opened the doors of her house and her heart. And

when, by a subtle cross examination that would have been a credit

to the wife of a Connecticut deacon, she discovered the fact that

her lodger was a minister, she did two things, with equal and

immediate fervour; she brought out the big Bible and asked him to

conduct evening worship, and she produced a bottle of old Glenlivet

and begged him to "guard against takkin' cauld by takkin' a glass

of speerits."

It was a very pleasant fortnight at Melvich. Mistress Macpherson

was so motherly that "takkin' cauld" was reduced to a permanent

impossibility. The other men at the inn proved to be very

companionable fellows, quite different from the monsters of

insolence that my anger had imagined in the moment of

disappointment. The shooting party kept the table abundantly

supplied with grouse and hares and highland venison; and there was

a piper to march up and down before the window and play while we

ate dinner--a very complimentary and disquieting performance. But

there are many occasions in life when pride can be entertained only

at the expense of comfort.

Of course Sandy was my gillie. It was a fine sight to see him

exhibiting the tiny American trout-rod, tied with silk ribbons in

its delicate case, to the other gillies and exulting over them.

Every morning he would lead me away through the heather to some

lonely loch on the shoulders of the hills, from which we could look

down upon the Northern Sea and the blue Orkney Isles far away across

the Pentland Firth. Sometimes we would find a loch with a boat on

it, and drift up and down, casting along the shores. Sometimes,

in spite of Sandy's confident predictions, no boat could be found,

and then I must put on the Mackintosh trousers and wade out over my

hips into the water, and circumambulate the pond, throwing the flies

as far as possible toward the middle, and feeling my way carefully

along the bottom with the long net-handle, while Sandy danced on

the bank in an agony of apprehension lest his Predestinated Opportunity

should step into a deep hole and be drowned. It was a curious fact

in natural history that on the lochs with boats the trout were in

the shallow water, but in the boatless lochs they were away out in

the depths. "Juist the total depraivity o' troots," said Sandy,

"an' terrible fateegin'."

Sandy had an aversion to commit himself to definite statements on

any subject not theological. If you asked him how long the

morning's tramp would be, it was "no verra long, juist a bit ayant

the hull yonner." And if, at the end of the seventh mile, you

complained that it was much too far, he would never do more than

admit that "it micht be shorter." If you called him to rejoice

over a trout that weighed close upon two pounds, he allowed that it

was "no bad--but there's bigger anes i' the loch gin we cud but

wile them oot." And at lunch-time, when we turned out a full

basket of shining fish on the heather, the most that he would say,

while his eyes snapped with joy and pride, was, "Aweel, we canna

complain, the day."

Then he would gather an armful of dried heather-stems for kindling,

and dig out a few roots and crooked limbs of the long-vanished

forest from the dry, brown, peaty soil, and make our campfire of

prehistoric wood--just for the pleasant, homelike look of the

blaze--and sit down beside it to eat our lunch. Heat is the least

of the benefits that man gets from fire. It is the sign of

cheerfulness and good comradeship. I would not willingly satisfy

my hunger, even in a summer nooning, without a little flame burning

on a rustic altar to consecrate and enliven the feast. When the

bread and cheese were finished and the pipes were filled with

Virginia tobacco, Sandy would begin to tell me, very solemnly and

respectfully, about the mistakes I had made in the fishing that

day, and mourn over the fact that the largest fish had not been

hooked. There was a strong strain of pessimism in Sandy, and he

enjoyed this part of the sport immensely.

But he was at his best in the walk home through the lingering

twilight, when the murmur of the sea trembled through the air, and

the incense of burning peat floated up from the cottages, and the

stars blossomed one by one in the pale-green sky. Then Sandy

dandered on at his ease down the hills, and discoursed of things in

heaven and earth. He was an unconscious follower of the theology

of the Reverend John Jasper, of Richmond, Virginia, and rejected

the Copernican theory of the universe as inconsistent with the

history of Joshua. "Gin the sun doesna muve," said he, "what for

wad Joshua be tellin' him to stond steel? 'A wad suner beleeve

there was a mistak' in the veesible heevens than ae fault in the

Guid Buik." Whereupon we held long discourse of astronomy and

inspiration; but Sandy concluded it with a philosophic word which

left little to be said: "Aweel, yon teelescope is a wonnerful

deescovery; but 'a dinna think the less o' the Baible."

III.

WHITE HEATHER.

Memory is a capricious and arbitrary creature. You never can tell

what pebble she will pick up from the shore of life to keep among

her treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of the field she will

preserve as the symbol of

"Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

She has her own scale of values for these mementos, and knows

nothing of the market price of precious stones or the costly

splendour of rare orchids. The thing that pleases her is the thing

that she will hold fast. And yet I do not doubt that the most

important things are always the best remembered; only we must learn

that the real importance of what we see and hear in the world is to

be measured at last by its meaning, its significance, its intimacy

with the heart of our heart and the life of our life. And when we

find a little token of the past very safely and imperishably kept

among our recollections, we must believe that memory has made no

mistake. It is because that little thing has entered into our

experience most deeply, that it stays with us and we cannot lose

it.

You have half forgotten many a famous scene that you travelled far

to look upon. You cannot clearly recall the sublime peak of Mont

Blanc, the roaring curve of Niagara, the vast dome of St. Peter's.

The music of Patti's crystalline voice has left no distinct echo in

your remembrance, and the blossoming of the century-plant is dimmer

than the shadow of a dream. But there is a nameless valley among

the hills where you can still trace every curve of the stream, and

see the foam-bells floating on the pool below the bridge, and the

long moss wavering in the current. There is a rustic song of a

girl passing through the fields at sunset, that still repeats its

far-off cadence in your listening ears. There is a small flower

trembling on its stem in some hidden nook beneath the open sky,

that never withers through all the changing years; the wind passes

over it, but it is not gone--it abides forever in your soul, an

amaranthine blossom of beauty and truth.

White heather is not an easy flower to find. You may look for it

among the highlands for a day without success. And when it is

discovered, there is little outward charm to commend it. It lacks

the grace of the dainty bells that hang so abundantly from the

Erica Tetralix, and the pink glow of the innumerable blossoms of

the common heather. But then it is a symbol. It is the Scotch

Edelweiss. It means sincere affection, and unselfish love, and

tender wishes as pure as prayers. I shall always remember the

evening when I found the white heather on the moorland above Glen

Ericht. Or, rather, it was not I that found it (for I have little

luck in the discovery of good omens, and have never plucked a four-

leaved clover in my life), but my companion, the gentle Mistress of

the Glen, whose hair was as white as the tiny blossoms, and yet

whose eyes were far quicker than mine to see and name every flower

that bloomed in those lofty, widespread fields.

Ericht Water is formed by the marriage of two streams, one flowing

out of Strath Ardle and the other descending from Cairn Gowar

through the long, lonely Pass of Glenshee. The Ericht begins at

the bridge of Cally, and its placid, beautiful glen, unmarred by

railway or factory, reaches almost down to Blairgowrie. On the

southern bank, but far above the water, runs the high road to

Braemar and the Linn of Dee. On the other side of the river,

nestling among the trees, is the low white manor-house,

"An ancient home of peace."

It is a place where one who had been wearied and perchance sore

wounded in the battle of life might well desire to be carried, as

Arthur to the island valley of Avilion, for rest and healing.

I have no thought of renewing the conflicts and cares that filled

that summer with sorrow. There were fightings without and fears

within; there was the surrender of an enterprise that had been

cherished since boyhood, and the bitter sense of irremediable

weakness that follows such a reverse; there was a touch of that

wrath with those we love, which, as Coleridge says,

"Doth work like madness in the brain;"

flying across the sea from these troubles, I had found my old

comrade of merrier days sentenced to death, and caught but a brief

glimpse of his pale, brave face as he went away into exile. At

such a time the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are

darkened, and the clouds return after rain. But through those

clouds the Mistress of the Glen came to meet me--a stranger till

then, but an appointed friend, a minister of needed grace, an angel

of quiet comfort. The thick mists of rebellion, mistrust, and

despair have long since rolled away, and against the background of

the hills her figure stands out clearly, dressed in the fashion of

fifty years ago, with the snowy hair gathered close beneath her

widow's cap, and a spray of white heather in her outstretched hand.

There were no other guests in the house by the river during those

still days in the noontide hush of midsummer. Every morning, while

the Mistress was busied with her household cares and letters, I

would be out in the fields hearing the lark sing, and watching the

rabbits as they ran to and fro, scattering the dew from the grass

in a glittering spray. Or perhaps I would be angling down the

river, with the swift pressure of the water around my knees, and an

inarticulate current of cooling thoughts flowing on and on through

my brain like the murmur of the stream. Every afternoon there were

long walks with the Mistress in the old-fashioned garden, where

wonderful roses were blooming; or through the dark, fir-shaded den

where the wild burn dropped down to join the river; or out upon the

high moor under the waning orange sunset. Every night there were

luminous and restful talks beside the open fire in the library,

when the words came clear and calm from the heart, unperturbed by

the vain desire of saying brilliant things, which turns so much of

our conversation into a combat of wits instead of an interchange of

thoughts. Talk like this is possible only between two. The

arrival of a third person sets the lists for a tournament, and

offers the prize for a verbal victory. But where there are only

two, the armour is laid aside, and there is no call to thrust and

parry.

One of the two should be a good listener, sympathetic, but not

silent, giving confidence in order to attract it--and of this art a

woman is the best master. But its finest secrets do not come to

her until she has passed beyond the uncertain season of compliments

and conquests, and entered into the serenity of a tranquil age.

What is this foolish thing that men say about the impossibility of

true intimacy and converse between the young and the old?

Hamerton, for example, in his book on Human Intercourse, would have

us believe that a difference in years is a barrier between hearts.

For my part, I have more often found it an open door, and a

security of generous and tolerant welcome for the young soldier,

who comes in tired and dusty from the battle-field, to tell his

story of defeat or victory in the garden of still thoughts where

old age is resting in the peace of honourable discharge. I like

what Robert Louis Stevenson says about it in his essay on Talk and

Talkers.

"Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their

minds are stored with antidotes, wisdom's simples, plain

considerations overlooked by youth. They have matter to

communicate, be they never so stupid. Their talk is not merely

literature, it is great literature; classic by virtue of the

speaker's detachment; studded, like a book of travel, with things

we should not otherwise have learnt. . . where youth agrees with

age, not where they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young

disciple finds his heart to beat in tune with his gray-haired

teacher's that a lesson may be learned."

The conversation of the Mistress of the Glen shone like the light

and distilled like the dew, not only by virtue of what she said,

but still more by virtue of what she was. Her face was a good

counsel against discouragement; and the cheerful quietude of her

demeanour was a rebuke to all rebellious, cowardly, and

discontented thoughts. It was not the striking novelty or

profundity of her commentary on life that made it memorable, it was

simply the truth of what she said and the gentleness with which she

said it. Epigrams are worth little for guidance to the perplexed,

and less for comfort to the wounded. But the plain, homely sayings

which come from a soul that has learned the lesson of patient

courage in the school of real experience, fall upon the wound like

drops of balsam, and like a soothing lotion up on the eyes smarting

and blinded with passion.

She spoke of those who had walked with her long ago in her garden,

and for whose sake, now that they had all gone into the world of

light, every flower was doubly dear. Would it be a true proof of

loyalty to them if she lived gloomily or despondently because they

were away? She spoke of the duty of being ready to welcome

happiness as well as to endure pain, and of the strength that

endurance wins by being grateful for small daily joys, like the

evening light, and the smell of roses, and the singing of birds.

She spoke of the faith that rests on the Unseen Wisdom and Love

like a child on its mother's breast, and of the melting away of

doubts in the warmth of an effort to do some good in the world.

And if that effort has conflict, and adventure, and confused noise,

and mistakes, and even defeats mingled with it, in the stormy years

of youth, is not that to be expected? The burn roars and leaps in

the den; the stream chafes and frets through the rapids of the

glen; the river does not grow calm and smooth until it nears the

sea. Courage is a virtue that the young cannot spare; to lose it

is to grow old before the time; it is better to make a thousand

mistakes and suffer a thousand reverses than to refuse the battle.

Resignation is the final courage of old age; it arrives in its own

season; and it is a good day when it comes to us. Then there are

no more disappointments; for we have learned that it is even better

to desire the things that we have than to have the things that we

desire. And is not the best of all our hopes--the hope of

immortality--always before us? How can we be dull or heavy while

we have that new experience to look forward to? It will be the

most joyful of all our travels and adventures. It will bring us

our best acquaintances and friendships. But there is only one way

to get ready for immortality, and that is to love this life, and

live it as bravely and cheerfully and faithfully as we can.

So my gentle teacher with the silver hair showed me the treasures

of her ancient, simple faith; and I felt that no sermons, nor

books, nor arguments can strengthen the doubting heart so deeply as

just to come into touch with a soul which has proved the truth of

that plain religion whose highest philosophy is "Trust in the Lord

and do good." At the end of the evening the household was gathered

for prayers, and the Mistress kneeled among her servants, leading

them, in her soft Scottish accent, through the old familiar

petitions for pardon for the errors of the day, and refreshing

sleep through the night and strength for the morrow. It is good to

be in a land where the people are not ashamed to pray. I have

shared the blessing of Catholics at their table in lowly huts among

the mountains of the Tyrol, and knelt with Covenanters at their

household altar in the glens of Scotland; and all around the world,

where the spirit of prayer is, there is peace. The genius of the

Scotch has made many contributions to literature, but none I think,

more precious, and none that comes closer to the heart, than the

prayer which Robert Louis Stevenson wrote for his family in distant

Samoa, the night before he died:--

"We beseech thee, Lord, to behold us with favour, folk of many

families and nations, gathered together in the peace of this roof:

weak men and women subsisting under the covert of thy patience. Be

patient still; suffer us yet a while longer--with our broken

promises of good, with our idle endeavours against evil--suffer us

a while longer to endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better.

Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these

must be taken, have us play the man under affliction. Be with our

friends, be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any

awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day

returns to us--our sun and comforter--call us with morning faces,

eager to labour, eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our

portion, and, if the day be marked to sorrow, strong to endure it.

We thank thee and praise thee; and, in the words of Him to whom

this day is sacred, close our oblation."

The man who made that kindly human prayer knew the meaning of white

heather. And I dare to hope that I too have known something of its

meaning, since that evening when the Mistress of the Glen picked

the spray and gave it to me on the lonely moor. "And now," she

said, "you will be going home across the sea; and you have been

welcome here, but it is time that you should go, for there is the

place where your real duties and troubles and joys are waiting for

you. And if you have left any misunderstandings behind you, you

will try to clear them up; and if there have been any quarrels, you

will heal them. Carry this little flower with you. It's not the

bonniest blossom in Scotland, but it's the dearest, for the message

that it brings. And you will remember that love is not

getting, but giving; not a wild dream of pleasure, and a madness of

desire--oh no, love is not that--it is goodness, and honour, and

peace, and pure living--yes, love is that; and it is the best thing

in the world, and the thing that lives longest. And that is what I

am wishing for you and yours with this bit of white heather."

THE RISTIGOUCHE FROM A HORSE-YACHT

Dr. Paley was ardently attached to this amusement; so much so that

when the Bishop of Durham inquired of him when one of his most

important works would be finished, he said, with great simplicity

and good humour, 'My Lord, I shall work steadily at it when the

fly-fishing season is over.'--SIR HUMPHRY DAVY: Salmonia.

The boundary line between the Province of Quebec and New Brunswick,

for a considerable part of its course, resembles the name of the

poet Keats; it is "writ in water." But like his fame, it is water

that never fails,--the limpid current of the river Ristigouche.

The railway crawls over it on a long bridge at Metapedia, and you

are dropped in the darkness somewhere between midnight and dawn.

When you open your window-shutters the next morning, you see that

the village is a disconsolate hamlet, scattered along the track as

if it had been shaken by chance from an open freight-car; it

consists of twenty houses, three shops, and a discouraged church

perched upon a little hillock like a solitary mourner on the

anxious seat. The one comfortable and prosperous feature in the

countenance of Metapedia is the house of the Ristigouche Salmon

Club--an old-fashioned mansion, with broad, white piazza, looking

over rich meadow-lands. Here it was that I found my friend

Favonius, president of solemn societies, pillar of church and

state, ingenuously arrayed in gray knickerbockers, a flannel shirt,

and a soft hat, waiting to take me on his horse-yacht for a voyage

up the river.

Have you ever seen a horse-yacht? Sometimes it is called a scow;

but that sounds common. Sometimes it is called a house-boat; but

that is too English. What does it profit a man to have a whole

dictionary full of language at his service, unless he can invent a

new and suggestive name for his friend's pleasure-craft? The

foundation of the horse-yacht--if a thing that floats may be called

fundamental--is a flat-bottomed boat, some fifty feet long and ten

feet wide, with a draft of about eight inches. The deck is open

for fifteen feet aft of the place where the bowsprit ought to be;

behind that it is completely covered by a house, cabin, cottage, or

whatever you choose to call it, with straight sides and a peaked

roof of a very early Gothic pattern. Looking in at the door you

see, first of all, two cots, one on either side of the passage;

then an open space with a dining-table, a stove, and some chairs;

beyond that a pantry with shelves, and a great chest for

provisions. A door at the back opens into the kitchen, and from

that another door opens into a sleeping-room for the boatmen. A

huge wooden tiller curves over the stern of the boat, and the

helmsman stands upon the kitchen-roof. Two canoes are floating

behind, holding back, at the end of their long tow-ropes, as if

reluctant to follow so clumsy a leader. This is an accurate

description of the horse-yacht. If necessary it could be sworn to

before a notary public. But I am perfectly sure that you might

read this page through without skipping a word, and if you had

never seen the creature with your own eyes, you would have no idea

how absurd it looks and how comfortable it is.

While we were stowing away our trunks and bags under the cots, and

making an equitable division of the hooks upon the walls, the

motive power of the yacht stood patiently upon the shore, stamping

a hoof, now and then, or shaking a shaggy head in mild protest

against the flies. Three more pessimistic-looking horses I never

saw. They were harnessed abreast, and fastened by a prodigious

tow-rope to a short post in the middle of the forward deck. Their

driver was a truculent, brigandish, bearded old fellow in long

boots, a blue flannel shirt, and a black sombrero. He sat upon the

middle horse, and some wild instinct of colour had made him tie a

big red handkerchief around his shoulders, so that the eye of the

beholder took delight in him. He posed like a bold, bad robber-

chief. But in point of fact I believe he was the mildest and most

inoffensive of men. We never heard him say anything except at a

distance, to his horses, and we did not inquire what that was.

Well, as I have said, we were haggling courteously over those hooks

in the cabin, when the boat gave a lurch. The bow swung out into

the stream. There was a scrambling and clattering of iron horse-

shoes on the rough shingle of the bank; and when we looked out of

doors, our house was moving up the river with the boat under it.

The Ristigouche is a noble stream, stately and swift and strong.

It rises among the dense forests in the northern part of New

Brunswick--a moist upland region, of never-failing springs and

innumerous lakes--and pours a flood of clear, cold water one

hundred and fifty miles northward and eastward through the hills

into the head of the Bay of Chaleurs. There are no falls in its

course, but rapids everywhere. It is steadfast but not impetuous,

quick but not turbulent, resolute and eager in its desire to get to

the sea, like the life of a man who has a purpose

"Too great for haste, too high for rivalry."

The wonder is where all the water comes from. But the river is fed

by more than six thousand square miles of territory. From both

sides the little brooks come dashing in with their supply. At

intervals a larger stream, reaching away back among the mountains

like a hand with many fingers to gather

"The filtered tribute of the rough woodland,"

delivers its generous offering to the main current.

The names of the chief tributaries of the Ristigouche are curious.

There is the headstrong Metapedia, and the crooked Upsalquitch, and

the Patapedia, and the Quatawamkedgwick. These are words at which

the tongue balks at first, but you soon grow used to them and learn

to take anything of five syllables with a rush, as a hunter takes a

five-barred gate, trusting to fortune that you will come down with

the accent in the right place.

For six or seven miles above Metapedia the river has a breadth of

about two hundred yards, and the valley slopes back rather gently

to the mountains on either side. There is a good deal of

cultivated land, and scattered farm-houses appear. The soil is

excellent. But it is like a pearl cast before an obstinate,

unfriendly climate. Late frosts prolong the winter. Early frosts

curtail the summer. The only safe crops are grass, oats, and

potatoes. And for half the year all the cattle must be housed and

fed to keep them alive. This lends a melancholy aspect to

agriculture. Most of the farmers look as if they had never seen

better days. With few exceptions they are what a New Englander

would call "slack-twisted and shiftless." Their barns are pervious

to the weather, and their fences fail to connect. Sleds and

ploughs rust together beside the house, and chickens scratch up the

front-door yard. In truth, the people have been somewhat

demoralised by the conflicting claims of different occupations;

hunting in the fall, lumbering in the winter and spring, and

working for the American sportsmen in the brief angling season, are

so much more attractive and offer so much larger returns of ready

money, that the tedious toil of farming is neglected. But for all

that, in the bright days of midsummer, these green fields sloping

down to the water, and pastures high up among the trees on the

hillsides, look pleasant from a distance, and give an inhabited air

to the landscape.

At the mouth of the Upsalquitch we passed the first of the fishing-

lodges. It belongs to a sage angler from Albany who saw the beauty

of the situation, years ago, and built a habitation to match it.

Since that time a number of gentlemen have bought land fronting on

good pools, and put up little cottages of a less classical style

than Charles Cotton's "Fisherman's Retreat" on the banks of the

river Dove, but better suited to this wild scenery, and more

convenient to live in. The prevailing pattern is a very simple

one; it consists of a broad piazza with a small house in the middle

of it. The house bears about the same proportion to the piazza

that the crown of a Gainsborough hat does to the brim. And the

cost of the edifice is to the cost of the land as the first price

of a share in a bankrupt railway is to the assessments which follow

the reorganisation. All the best points have been sold, and real

estate on the Ristigouche has been bid up to an absurd figure. In

fact, the river is over-populated and probably over-fished. But we

could hardly find it in our hearts to regret this, for it made the

upward trip a very sociable one. At every lodge that was open,

Favonius (who knows everybody) had a friend, and we must slip

ashore in a canoe to leave the mail and refresh the inner man.

An angler, like an Arab, regards hospitality as a religious duty.

There seems to be something in the craft which inclines the heart

to kindness and good-fellowship. Few anglers have I seen who were

not pleasant to meet, and ready to do a good turn to a fellow-

fisherman with the gift of a killing fly or the loan of a rod. Not

their own particular and well-proved favourite, of course, for that

is a treasure which no decent man would borrow; but with that

exception the best in their store is at the service of an

accredited brother. One of the Ristigouche proprietors I remember,

whose name bespoke him a descendant of Caledonia's patron saint.

He was fishing in front of his own door when we came up, with our

splashing horses, through the pool; but nothing would do but he

must up anchor and have us away with him into the house to taste

his good cheer. And there were his daughters with their books and

needlework, and the photographs which they had taken pinned up on

the wooden walls, among Japanese fans and bits of bright-coloured

stuff in which the soul of woman delights, and, in a passive,

silent way, the soul of man also. Then, after we had discussed the

year's fishing, and the mysteries of the camera, and the deep

question of what makes some negatives too thin and others too

thick, we must go out to see the big salmon which one of the ladies

had caught a few days before, and the large trout swimming about in

their cold spring. It seemed to me, as we went on our way, that

there could hardly be a more wholesome and pleasant summer-life for

well-bred young women than this, or two amusements more innocent

and sensible than photography and fly-fishing.

It must be confessed that the horse-yacht as a vehicle of travel is

not remarkable in point of speed. Three miles an hour is not a

very rapid rate of motion. But then, if you are not in a hurry,

why should you care to make haste?

The wild desire to be forever racing against old Father Time is one

of the kill-joys of modern life. That ancient traveller is sure to

beat you in the long run, and as long as you are trying to rival

him, he will make your life a burden. But if you will only

acknowledge his superiority and profess that you do not approve of

racing after all, he will settle down quietly beside you and jog

along like the most companionable of creatures. That is a pleasant

pilgrimage in which the journey itself is part of the destination.

As soon as one learns to regard the horse-yacht as a sort of moving

house, it appears admirable. There is no dust or smoke, no rumble

of wheels, or shriek of whistles. You are gliding along steadily

through an ever-green world; skirting the silent hills; passing

from one side of the river to the other when the horses have to

swim the current to find a good foothold on the bank. You are on

the water, but not at its mercy, for your craft is not disturbed by

the heaving of rude waves, and the serene inhabitants do not say "I

am sick." There is room enough to move about without falling

overboard. You may sleep, or read, or write in your cabin, or sit

upon the floating piazza in an arm-chair and smoke the pipe of

peace, while the cool breeze blows in your face and the musical

waves go singing down to the sea.

There was one feature about the boat, which commended itself very

strongly to my mind. It was possible to stand upon the forward

deck and do a little trout-fishing in motion. By watching your

chance, when the corner of a good pool was within easy reach, you

could send out a hasty line and cajole a sea-trout from his hiding-

place. It is true that the tow-ropes and the post made the back

cast a little awkward; and the wind sometimes blew the flies up on

the roof of the cabin; but then, with patience and a short line the

thing could be done. I remember a pair of good trout that rose

together just as we were going through a boiling rapid; and it

tried the strength of my split-bamboo rod to bring those fish to

the net against the current and the motion of the boat.

When nightfall approached we let go the anchor (to wit, a rope tied

to a large stone on the shore), ate our dinner "with gladness and

singleness of heart" like the early Christians, and slept the sleep

of the just, lulled by the murmuring of the waters, and defended

from the insidious attacks of the mosquito by the breeze blowing

down the river and the impregnable curtains over our beds. At

daybreak, long before Favonius and I had finished our dreams, we

were under way again; and when the trampling of the horses on some

rocky shore wakened us, we could see the steep hills gliding past

the windows and hear the rapids dashing against the side of the

boat, and it seemed as if we were still dreaming.

At Cross Point, where the river makes a long loop around a narrow

mountain, thin as a saw and crowned on its jagged edge by a rude

wooden cross, we stopped for an hour to try the fishing. It was

here that I hooked two mysterious creatures, each of which took the

fly when it was below the surface, pulled for a few moments in a

sullen way and then apparently melted into nothingness. It will

always be a source of regret to me that the nature of these fish

must remain unknown. While they were on the line it was the

general opinion that they were heavy trout; but no sooner had they

departed, than I became firmly convinced, in accordance with a

psychological law which holds good all over the world, that they

were both enormous salmon. Even the Turks have a proverb which

says, "Every fish that escapes appears larger than it is." No one

can alter that conviction, because no one can logically refute it.

Our best blessings, like our largest fish, always depart before we

have time to measure them.

The Slide Pool is in the wildest and most picturesque part of the

river, about thirty-five miles above Metapedia. The stream,

flowing swiftly down a stretch of rapids between forest-clad hills,

runs straight toward the base of an eminence so precipitous that

the trees can hardly find a foothold upon it, and seem to be

climbing up in haste on either side of the long slide which leads

to the summit. The current, barred by the wall of rock, takes a

great sweep to the right, dashing up at first in angry waves, then

falling away in oily curves and eddies, until at last it sleeps in

a black deep, apparently almost motionless, at the foot of the

hill. It was here, on the upper edge of the stream, opposite to

the slide, that we brought our floating camp to anchor for some

days. What does one do in such a watering-place?

Let us take a "specimen day." It is early morning, or to be more

precise, about eight of the clock, and the white fog is just

beginning to curl and drift away from the surface of the river.

Sooner than this it would be idle to go out. The preternaturally

early bird in his greedy haste may catch the worm; but the salmon

never take the fly until the fog has lifted; and in this the

scientific angler sees, with gratitude, a remarkable adaptation of

the laws of nature to the tastes of man. The canoes are waiting at

the front door. We step into them and push off, Favonius going up

the stream a couple of miles to the mouth of the Patapedia, and I

down, a little shorter distance, to the famous Indian House Pool.

The slim boat glides easily on the current, with a smooth buoyant

motion, quickened by the strokes of the paddles in the bow and the

stern. We pass around two curves in the river and find ourselves

at the head of the pool. Here the man in the stern drops the

anchor, just on the edge of the bar where the rapid breaks over

into the deeper water. The long rod is lifted; the fly unhooked

from the reel; a few feet of line pulled through the rings, and the

fishing begins.

First cast,--to the right, straight across the stream, about twenty

feet: the current carries the fly down with a semicircular sweep,

until it comes in line with the bow of the canoe. Second cast,--to

the left, straight across the stream, with the same motion: the

semicircle is completed, and the fly hangs quivering for a few

seconds at the lowest point of the arc. Three or four feet of line

are drawn from the reel. Third cast to the right; fourth cast to

the left. Then a little more line. And so, with widening half-

circles, the water is covered, gradually and very carefully, until

at length the angler has as much line out as his two-handed rod can

lift and swing. Then the first "drop" is finished; the man in the

stern quietly pulls up the anchor and lets the boat drift down a

few yards; the same process is repeated on the second drop; and so

on, until the end of the run is reached and the fly has passed over

all the good water. This seems like a very regular and somewhat

mechanical proceeding as one describes it, but in the performance

it is rendered intensely interesting by the knowledge that at any

moment it is liable to be interrupted.

This morning the interruption comes early. At the first cast of

the second drop, before the fly has fairly lit, a great flash of

silver darts from the waves close by the boat. Usually a salmon

takes the fly rather slowly, carrying it under water before he

seizes it in his mouth. But this one is in no mood for

deliberation. He has hooked himself with a rush, and the line goes

whirring madly from the reel as he races down the pool. Keep the

point of the rod low; he must have his own way now. Up with the

anchor quickly, and send the canoe after him, bowman and sternman

paddling with swift strokes. He has reached the deepest water; he

stops to think what has happened to him; we have passed around and

below him; and now, with the current to help us, we can begin to

reel in. Lift the point of the rod, with a strong, steady pull.

Put the force of both arms into it. The tough wood will stand the

strain. The fish must be moved; he must come to the boat if he is

ever to be landed. He gives a little and yields slowly to the

pressure. Then suddenly he gives too much, and runs straight

toward us. Reel in now as swiftly as possible, or else he will get

a slack on the line and escape. Now he stops, shakes his head from

side to side, and darts away again across the pool, leaping high

out of water. Don't touch the reel! Drop the point of the rod

quickly, for if he falls on the leader he will surely break it.

Another leap, and another! Truly he is "a merry one," and it will

go hard with us to hold him. But those great leaps have exhausted

his strength, and now he follows the rod more easily. The men push

the boat back to the shallow side of the pool until it touches

lightly on the shore. The fish comes slowly in, fighting a little

and making a few short runs; he is tired and turns slightly on his

side; but even yet he is a heavy weight on the line, and it seems a

wonder that so slight a thing as the leader can guide and draw him.

Now he is close to the boat. The boatman steps out on a rock with

his gaff. Steadily now and slowly, lift the rod, bending it

backward. A quick sure stroke of the steel! a great splash! and

the salmon is lifted upon the shore. How he flounces about on the

stones. Give him the coup de grace at once, for his own sake as

well as for ours. And now look at him, as he lies there on the

green leaves. Broad back; small head tapering to a point; clean,

shining sides with a few black spots on them; it is a fish fresh-

run from the sea, in perfect condition, and that is the reason why

he has given such good sport.

We must try for another before we go back. Again fortune favours

us, and at eleven o'clock we pole up the river to the camp with two

good salmon in the canoe. Hardly have we laid them away in the

ice-box, when Favonius comes dropping down from Patapedia with

three fish, one of them a twenty-four pounder. And so the

morning's work is done.

In the evening, after dinner, it was our custom to sit out on the

deck, watching the moonlight as it fell softly over the black hills

and changed the river into a pale flood of rolling gold. The

fragrant wreaths of smoke floated lazily away on the faint breeze

of night. There was no sound save the rushing of the water and the

crackling of the camp-fire on the shore. We talked of many things

in the heavens above, and the earth beneath, and the waters under

the earth; touching lightly here and there as the spirit of vagrant

converse led us. Favonius has the good sense to talk about himself

occasionally and tell his own experience. The man who will not do

that must always be a dull companion. Modest egoism is the salt of

conversation: you do not want too much of it; but if it is

altogether omitted, everything tastes flat. I remember well the

evening when he told me the story of the Sheep of the Wilderness.

"I was ill that summer," said he, "and the doctor had ordered me to

go into the woods, but on no account to go without plenty of fresh

meat, which was essential to my recovery. So we set out into the

wild country north of Georgian Bay, taking a live sheep with us in

order to be sure that the doctor's prescription might be faithfully

followed. It was a young and innocent little beast, curling itself

up at my feet in the canoe, and following me about on shore like a

dog. I gathered grass every day to feed it, and carried it in my

arms over the rough portages. It ate out of my hand and rubbed its

woolly head against my leggings. To my dismay, I found that I was

beginning to love it for its own sake and without any ulterior

motives. The thought of killing and eating it became more and more

painful to me, until at length the fatal fascination was complete,

and my trip became practically an exercise of devotion to that

sheep. I carried it everywhere and ministered fondly to its wants.

Not for the world would I have alluded to mutton in its presence.

And when we returned to civilisation I parted from the creature

with sincere regret and the consciousness that I had humoured my

affections at the expense of my digestion. The sheep did not give

me so much as a look of farewell, but fell to feeding on the grass

beside the farm-house with an air of placid triumph."

After hearing this touching tale, I was glad that no great intimacy

had sprung up between Favonius and the chickens which we carried in

a coop on the forecastle head, for there is no telling what

restrictions his tender-heartedness might have laid upon our

larder. But perhaps a chicken would not have given such an opening

for misplaced affection as a sheep. There is a great difference in

animals in this respect. I certainly never heard of any one

falling in love with a salmon in such a way as to regard it as a

fond companion. And this may be one reason why no sensible person

who has tried fishing has ever been able to see any cruelty in it.

Suppose the fish is not caught by an angler, what is his

alternative fate? He will either perish miserably in the struggles

of the crowded net, or die of old age and starvation like the long,

lean stragglers which are sometimes found in the shallow pools, or

be devoured by a larger fish, or torn to pieces by a seal or an

otter. Compared with any of these miserable deaths, the fate of a

salmon who is hooked in a clear stream and after a glorious fight

receives the happy despatch at the moment when he touches the

shore, is a sort of euthanasia. And, since the fish was made to be

man's food, the angler who brings him to the table of destiny in

the cleanest, quickest, kindest way is, in fact, his benefactor.

There were some days, however, when our benevolent intentions

toward the salmon were frustrated; mornings when they refused to

rise, and evenings when they escaped even the skilful endeavours of

Favonius. In vain did he try every fly in his book, from the

smallest "Silver Doctor" to the largest "Golden Eagle." The "Black

Dose" would not move them. The "Durham Ranger" covered the pool in

vain. On days like this, if a stray fish rose, it was hard to land

him, for he was usually but slightly hooked.

I remember one of these shy creatures which led me a pretty dance

at the mouth of Patapedia. He came to the fly just at dusk, rising

very softly and quietly, as if he did not really care for it but

only wanted to see what it was like. He went down at once into

deep water, and began the most dangerous and exasperating of all

salmon-tactics, moving around in slow circles and shaking his head

from side to side, with sullen pertinacity. This is called

"jigging," and unless it can be stopped, the result is fatal.

I could not stop it. That salmon was determined to jig. He knew

more than I did.

The canoe followed him down the pool. He jigged away past all

three of the inlets of the Patapedia, and at last, in the still,

deep water below, after we had laboured with him for half an hour,

and brought him near enough to see that he was immense, he calmly

opened his mouth and the fly came back to me void. That was a sad

evening, in which all the consolations of philosophy were needed.

Sunday was a very peaceful day in our camp. In the Dominion of

Canada, the question "to fish or not to fish" on the first day of

the week is not left to the frailty of the individual conscience.

The law on the subject is quite explicit, and says that between six

o'clock on Saturday evening and six o'clock on Monday morning all

nets shall be taken up and no one shall wet a line. The

Ristigouche Salmon Club has its guardians stationed all along the

river, and they are quite as inflexible in seeing that their

employers keep this law as the famous sentinel was in refusing to

let Napoleon pass without the countersign. But I do not think that

these keen sportsmen regard it as a hardship; they are quite

willing that the fish should have "an off day" in every week, and

only grumble because some of the net-owners down at the mouth of

the river have brought political influence to bear in their favour

and obtained exemption from the rule. For our part, we were

nothing loath to hang up our rods, and make the day different from

other days.

In the morning we had a service in the cabin of the boat, gathering

a little congregation of guardians and boatmen, and people from a

solitary farm-house by the river. They came in pirogues--long,

narrow boats hollowed from the trunk of a tree; the black-eyed,

brown-faced girls sitting back to back in the middle of the boat,

and the men standing up bending to their poles. It seemed a

picturesque way of travelling, although none too safe.

In the afternoon we sat on deck and looked at the water. What a

charm there is in watching a swift stream! The eye never wearies

of following its curls and eddies, the shadow of the waves dancing

over the stones, the strange, crinkling lines of sunlight in the

shallows. There is a sort of fascination in it, lulling and

soothing the mind into a quietude which is even pleasanter than

sleep, and making it almost possible to do that of which we so

often speak, but which we never quite accomplish--"think about

nothing." Out on the edge of the pool, we could see five or six

huge salmon, moving slowly from side to side, or lying motionless

like gray shadows. There was nothing to break the silence except

the thin clear whistle of the white-throated sparrow far back in

the woods. This is almost the only bird-song that one hears on the

river, unless you count the metallic "chr-r-r-r" of the kingfisher

as a song.

Every now and then one of the salmon in the pool would lazily roll

out of water, or spring high into the air and fall back with a

heavy splash. What is it that makes salmon leap? Is it pain or

pleasure? Do they do it to escape the attack of another fish, or

to shake off a parasite that clings to them, or to practise jumping

so that they can ascend the falls when they reach them, or simply

and solely out of exuberant gladness and joy of living? Any one of

these reasons would be enough to account for it on week-days. On

Sunday I am quite sure they do it for the trial of the fisherman's

faith.

But how should I tell all the little incidents which made that lazy

voyage so delightful? Favonius was the ideal host, for on water,

as well as on land, he knows how to provide for the liberty as well

as for the wants of his guests. He understands also the fine art

of conversation, which consists of silence as well as speech. And

when it comes to angling, Izaak Walton himself could not have been

a more profitable teacher by precept or example. Indeed, it is a

curious thought, and one full of sadness to a well-constituted

mind, that on the Ristigouche "I. W." would have been at sea, for

the beloved father of all fishermen passed through this world

without ever catching a salmon. So ill does fortune match with

merit here below.

At last the days of idleness were ended. We could not

"Fold our tents like the Arabs,

 and as silently steal away;"

but we took down the long rods, put away the heavy reels, made the

canoes fast to the side of the house, embarked the three horses on

the front deck, and then dropped down with the current, swinging

along through the rapids, and drifting slowly through the still

places, now grounding on a hidden rock, and now sweeping around a

sharp curve, until at length we saw the roofs of Metapedia and the

ugly bridge of the railway spanning the river. There we left our

floating house, awkward and helpless, like some strange relic of

the flood, stranded on the shore. And as we climbed the bank we

looked back and wondered whether Noah was sorry when he said good-

bye to his ark.

ALPENROSEN AND GOAT'S MILK

Nay, let me tell you, there be many that have forty times our

estates, that would give the greatest part of it to be healthful

and cheerful like us; who, with the expense of a little money, have

ate, and drank, and laughed, and angled, and sung, and slept

securely; and rose next day, and cast away care, and sung, and

laughed, and angled again; which are blessings rich men cannot

purchase with all their money."--IZAAK WALTON: The Complete Angler.

A great deal of the pleasure of life lies in bringing together

things which have no connection. That is the secret of humour--at

least so we are told by the philosophers who explain the jests that

other men have made--and in regard to travel, I am quite sure that

it must be illogical in order to be entertaining. The more

contrasts it contains, the better.

Perhaps it was some philosophical reflection of this kind that

brought me to the resolution, on a certain summer day, to make a

little journey, as straight as possible, from the sea-level streets

of Venice to the lonely, lofty summit of a Tyrolese mountain,

called, for no earthly reason that I can discover, the Gross-

Venediger.

But apart from the philosophy of the matter, which I must confess

to passing over very superficially at the time, there were other

and more cogent reasons for wanting to go from Venice to the Big

Venetian. It was the first of July, and the city on the sea was

becoming tepid. A slumbrous haze brooded over canals and palaces

and churches. It was difficult to keep one's conscience awake to

Baedeker and a sense of moral obligation; Ruskin was impossible,

and a picture-gallery was a penance. We floated lazily from one

place to another, and decided that, after all, it was too warm to

go in. The cries of the gondoliers, at the canal corners, grew

more and more monotonous and dreamy. There was danger of our

falling fast asleep and having to pay by the hour for a day's

repose in a gondola. If it grew much warmer, we might be compelled

to stay until the following winter in order to recover energy

enough to get away. All the signs of the times pointed northward,

to the mountains, where we should see glaciers and snow-fields, and

pick Alpenrosen, and drink goat's milk fresh from the real goat.

I.

The first stage on the journey thither was by rail to Belluno--

about four or five hours. It is a sufficient commentary on railway

travel that the most important thing about it is to tell how many

hours it takes to get from one place to another.

We arrived in Belluno at night, and when we awoke the next morning

we found ourselves in a picturesque little city of Venetian aspect,

with a piazza and a campanile and a Palladian cathedral, surrounded

on all sides by lofty hills. We were at the end of the railway and

at the beginning of the Dolomites.

Although I have a constitutional aversion to scientific information

given by unscientific persons, such as clergymen and men of

letters, I must go in that direction far enough to make it clear

that the word Dolomite does not describe a kind of fossil, nor a

sect of heretics, but a formation of mountains lying between the

Alps and the Adriatic. Draw a diamond on the map, with Brixen at

the northwest corner, Lienz at the northeast, Belluno at the

southeast, and Trent at the southwest, and you will have included

the region of the Dolomites, a country so picturesque, so

interesting, so full of sublime and beautiful scenery, that it is

equally a wonder and a blessing that it has not been long since

completely overrun by tourists and ruined with railways. It is

true, the glaciers and snowfields are limited; the waterfalls are

comparatively few and slender, and the rivers small; the loftiest

peaks are little more than ten thousand feet high. But, on the

other hand, the mountains are always near, and therefore always

imposing. Bold, steep, fantastic masses of naked rock, they rise

suddenly from the green and flowery valleys in amazing and endless

contrast; they mirror themselves in the tiny mountain lakes like

pictures in a dream.

I believe the guide-book says that they are formed of carbonate of

lime and carbonate of magnesia in chemical composition; but even if

this be true, it need not prejudice any candid observer against

them. For the simple and fortunate fact is that they are built of

such stone that wind and weather, keen frost and melting snow and

rushing water have worn and cut and carved them into a thousand

shapes of wonder and beauty. It needs but little fancy to see in

them walls and towers, cathedrals and campaniles, fortresses and

cities, tinged with many hues from pale gray to deep red, and

shining in an air so soft, so pure, so cool, so fragrant, under a

sky so deep and blue and a sunshine so genial, that it seems like

the happy union of Switzerland and Italy.

The great highway through this region from south to north is the

Ampezzo road, which was constructed in 1830, along the valleys of

the Piave, the Boite, and the Rienz--the ancient line of travel and

commerce between Venice and Innsbruck. The road is superbly built,

smooth and level. Our carriage rolled along so easily that we

forgot and forgave its venerable appearance and its lack of

accommodation for trunks. We had been persuaded to take four

horses, as our luggage seemed too formidable for a single pair.

But in effect our concession to apparent necessity turned out to be

a mere display of superfluous luxury, for the two white leaders did

little more than show their feeble paces, leaving the gray wheelers

to do the work. We had the elevating sense of traveling four-in-

hand, however--a satisfaction to which I do not believe any human

being is altogether insensible.

At Longarone we breakfasted for the second time, and entered the

narrow gorge of the Piave. The road was cut out of the face of the

rock. Below us the long lumber-rafts went shooting down the swift

river. Above, on the right, were the jagged crests of Monte Furlon

and Premaggiore, which seemed to us very wonderful, because we had

not yet learned how jagged the Dolomites can be. At Perarolo,

where the Boite joins the Piave, there is a lump of a mountain in

the angle between the rivers, and around this we crawled in long

curves until we had risen a thousand feet, and arrived at the same

Hotel Venezia, where we were to dine.

While dinner was preparing, the Deacon and I walked up to Pieve di

Cadore, the birthplace of Titian. The house in which the great

painter first saw the colours of the world is still standing, and

tradition points out the very room in which he began to paint. I

am not one of those who would inquire too closely into such a

legend as this. The cottage may have been rebuilt a dozen times

since Titian's day; not a scrap of the original stone or plaster

may remain; but beyond a doubt the view that we saw from the window

is the same that Titian saw. Now, for the first time, I could

understand and appreciate the landscape-backgrounds of his

pictures. The compact masses of mountains, the bold, sharp forms,

the hanging rocks of cold gray emerging from green slopes, the

intense blue aerial distances--these all had seemed to be unreal

and imaginary--compositions of the studio. But now I knew that,

whether Titian painted out-of-doors, like our modern

impressionists, or not, he certainly painted what he had seen, and

painted it as it is.

The graceful brown-eyed boy who showed us the house seemed also to

belong to one of Titian's pictures. As we were going away, the

Deacon, for lack of copper, rewarded him with a little silver

piece, a half-lira, in value about ten cents. A celestial rapture

of surprise spread over the child's face, and I know not what

blessings he invoked upon us. He called his companions to rejoice

with him, and we left them clapping their hands and dancing.

Driving after one has dined has always a peculiar charm. The

motion seems pleasanter, the landscape finer than in the morning

hours. The road from Cadore ran on a high level, through sloping

pastures, white villages, and bits of larch forest. In its narrow

bed, far below, the river Boite roared as gently as Bottom's lion.

The afternoon sunlight touched the snow-capped pinnacle of Antelao

and the massive pink wall of Sorapis on the right; on the left,

across the valley, Monte Pelmo's vast head and the wild crests of

La Rochetta and Formin rose dark against the glowing sky. The

peasants lifted their hats as we passed, and gave us a pleasant

evening greeting. And so, almost without knowing it, we slipped

out of Italy into Austria, and drew up before a bare, square stone

building with the double black eagle, like a strange fowl split for

broiling, staring at us from the wall, and an inscription to the

effect that this was the Royal and Imperial Austrian Custom-house.

The officer saluted us so politely that we felt quite sorry that

his duty required him to disturb our luggage. "The law obliged him

to open one trunk; courtesy forbade him to open more." It was

quickly done; and, without having to make any contribution to the

income of His Royal and Imperial Majesty, Francis Joseph, we rolled

on our way, through the hamlets of Acqua Bona and Zuel, into the

Ampezzan metropolis of Cortina, at sundown.

The modest inn called "The Star of Gold" stood facing the public

square, just below the church, and the landlady stood facing us in

the doorway, with an enthusiastic welcome--altogether a most

friendly and entertaining landlady, whose one desire in life seemed

to be that we should never regret having chosen her house instead

of "The White Cross," or "The Black Eagle."

"O ja!" she had our telegram received; and would we look at the

rooms? Outlooking on the piazza, with a balcony from which we

could observe the Festa of to-morrow. She hoped they would please

us. "Only come in; accommodate yourselves."

It was all as she promised; three little bedrooms, and a little

salon opening on a little balcony; queer old oil-paintings and

framed embroideries and tiles hanging on the walls; spotless

curtains, and board floors so white that it would have been a shame

to eat off them without spreading a cloth to keep them from being

soiled.

"These are the rooms of the Baron Rothschild when he comes here

always in the summer--with nine horses and nine servants--the Baron

Rothschild of Vienna."

I assured her that we did not know the Baron, but that should make

no difference. We would not ask her to reduce the price on account

of a little thing like that.

She did not quite grasp this idea, but hoped that we would not find

the pension too dear at a dollar and fifty-seven and a half cents a

day each, with a little extra for the salon and the balcony. "The

English people all please themselves here--there comes many every

summer--English Bishops and their families."

I inquired whether there were many Bishops in the house at that

moment.

"No, just at present--she was very sorry--none."

"Well, then," I said, "it is all right. We will take the rooms."

Good Signora Barbaria, you did not speak the American language, nor

understand those curious perversions of thought which pass among

the Americans for humour; but you understood how to make a little

inn cheerful and home-like; yours was a very simple and agreeable

art of keeping a hotel. As we sat in the balcony after supper,

listening to the capital playing of the village orchestra, and the

Tyrolese songs with which they varied their music, we thought

within ourselves that we were fortunate to have fallen upon the

Star of Gold.

II.

Cortina lies in its valley like a white shell that has rolled down

into a broad vase of malachite. It has about a hundred houses and

seven hundred inhabitants, a large church and two small ones, a

fine stone campanile with excellent bells, and seven or eight

little inns. But it is more important than its size would signify,

for it is the capital of the district whose lawful title is

Magnifica Comunita di Ampezzo--a name conferred long ago by the

Republic of Venice. In the fifteenth century it was Venetian

territory; but in 1516, under Maximilian I., it was joined to

Austria; and it is now one of the richest and most prosperous

communes of the Tyrol. It embraces about thirty-five hundred

people, scattered in hamlets and clusters of houses through the

green basin with its four entrances, lying between the peaks of

Tofana, Cristallo, Sorapis, and Nuvolau. The well-cultivated grain

fields and meadows, the smooth alps filled with fine cattle, the

well-built houses with their white stone basements and balconies of

dark brown wood and broad overhanging roofs, all speak of industry

and thrift. But there is more than mere agricultural prosperity in

this valley. There is a fine race of men and women--intelligent,

vigorous, and with a strong sense of beauty. The outer walls of

the annex of the Hotel Aquila Nera are covered with frescoes of

marked power and originality, painted by the son of the innkeeper.

The art schools of Cortina are famous for their beautiful work in

gold and silver filigree, and wood-inlaying. There are nearly two

hundred pupils in these schools, all peasants' children, and they

produce results, especially in intarsia, which are admirable. The

village orchestra, of which I spoke a moment ago, is trained and

led by a peasant's son, who has never had a thorough musical

education. It must have at least twenty-five members, and as we

heard them at the Festa they seemed to play with extraordinary

accuracy and expression.

This Festa gave us a fine chance to see the people of the Ampezzo

all together. It was the annual jubilation of the district; and

from all the outlying hamlets and remote side valleys, even from

the neighbouring vales of Agordo and Auronzo, across the mountains,

and from Cadore, the peasants, men and women and children, had come

in to the Sagro at Cortina. The piazza--which is really nothing

more than a broadening of the road behind the church--was quite

thronged. There must have been between two and three thousand

people.

The ceremonies of the day began with general church-going. The

people here are honestly and naturally religious. I have seen so

many examples of what can only be called "sincere and unaffected

piety," that I cannot doubt it. The church, on Cortina's feast-

day, was crowded to the doors with worshippers, who gave every

evidence of taking part not only with the voice, but also with the

heart, in the worship.

Then followed the public unveiling of a tablet, on the wall of the

little Inn of the Anchor, to the memory of Giammaria Ghedini, the

founder of the art-schools of Cortina. There was music by the

band; and an oration by a native Demosthenes (who spoke in Italian

so fluent that it ran through one's senses like water through a

sluice, leaving nothing behind), and an original Canto sung by the

village choir, with a general chorus, in which they called upon the

various mountains to "re-echo the name of the beloved master John-

Mary as a model of modesty and true merit," and wound up with--

"Hurrah for John-Mary!  Hurrah for his art!

 Hurrah for all teachers as skilful as he!

 Hurrah for us all, who have now taken part

 In singing together in do . . re . . mi."

It was very primitive, and I do not suppose that the celebration

was even mentioned in the newspapers of the great world; but, after

all, has not the man who wins such a triumph as this in the hearts

of his own people, for whom he has made labour beautiful with the

charm of art, deserved better of fame than many a crowned monarch

or conquering warrior? We should be wiser if we gave less glory to

the men who have been successful in forcing their fellow-men to

die, and more glory to the men who have been successful in teaching

their fellow-men how to live.

But the Festa of Cortina did not remain all day on this high moral

plane. In the afternoon came what our landlady called "allerlei

Dummheiten." There was a grand lottery for the benefit of the

Volunteer Fire Department. The high officials sat up in a green

wooden booth in the middle of the square, and called out the

numbers and distributed the prizes. Then there was a greased pole

with various articles of an attractive character tied to a large

hoop at the top--silk aprons, and a green jacket, and bottles of

wine, and half a smoked pig, and a coil of rope, and a purse.

The gallant firemen voluntarily climbed up the pole as far as

they could, one after another, and then involuntarily slid down

again exhausted, each one wiping off a little more of the grease,

until at last the lucky one came who profited by his forerunners'

labours, and struggled to the top to snatch the smoked pig.

After that it was easy.

Such is success in this unequal world; the man who wipes off the

grease seldom gets the prize.

Then followed various games, with tubs of water; and coins fastened

to the bottom of a huge black frying-pan, to be plucked off with

the lips; and pots of flour to be broken with sticks; so that the

young lads of the village were ducked and blackened and powdered to

an unlimited extent, amid the hilarious applause of the spectators.

In the evening there was more music, and the peasants danced in the

square, the women quietly and rather heavily, but the men with

amazing agility, slapping the soles of their shoes with their

hands, or turning cartwheels in front of their partners. At dark

the festivities closed with a display of fireworks; there were

rockets and bombs and pin-wheels; and the boys had tiny red and

blue lights which they held until their fingers were burned, just

as boys do in America; and there was a general hush of wonder as a

particularly brilliant rocket swished into the dark sky; and when

it burst into a rain of serpents, the crowd breathed out its

delight in a long-drawn "Ah-h-h-h!" just as the crowd does

everywhere. We might easily have imagined ourselves at a Fourth of

July celebration in Vermont, if it had not been for the costumes.

The men of the Ampezzo Valley have kept but little that is peculiar

in their dress. Men are naturally more progressive than women, and

therefore less picturesque. The tide of fashion has swept them

into the international monotony of coat and vest and trousers--

pretty much the same, and equally ugly, all over the world. Now

and then you may see a short jacket with silver buttons, or a pair

of knee-breeches; and almost all the youths wear a bunch of

feathers or a tuft of chamois' hair in their soft green hats. But

the women of the Ampezzo--strong, comely, with golden brown

complexions, and often noble faces--are not ashamed to dress as

their grandmothers did. They wear a little round black felt hat

with rolled rim and two long ribbons hanging down at the back.

Their hair is carefully braided and coiled, and stuck through and

through with great silver pins. A black bodice, fastened with

silver clasps, is covered in front with the ends of a brilliant

silk kerchief, laid in many folds around the shoulders. The white

shirt-sleeves are very full and fastened up above the elbow with

coloured ribbon. If the weather is cool, the women wear a short

black jacket, with satin yoke and high puffed sleeves. But,

whatever the weather may be, they make no change in the large, full

dark skirts, almost completely covered with immense silk aprons, by

preference light blue. It is not a remarkably brilliant dress,

compared with that which one may still see in some districts of

Norway or Sweden, but upon the whole it suits the women of the

Ampezzo wonderfully.

For my part, I think that when a woman has found a dress that

becomes her, it is a waste of time to send to Paris for a fashion-

plate.

III.

When the excitement of the Festa had subsided, we were free to

abandon ourselves to the excursions in which the neighbourhood of

Cortina abounds, and to which the guide-book earnestly calls every

right-minded traveller. A walk through the light-green shadows of

the larch-woods to the tiny lake of Ghedina, where we could see all

the four dozen trout swimming about in the clear water and catching

flies; a drive to the Belvedere, where there are superficial

refreshments above and profound grottos below; these were trifles,

though we enjoyed them. But the great mountains encircling us on

every side, standing out in clear view with that distinctness and

completeness of vision which is one charm of the Dolomites, seemed

to summon us to more arduous enterprises. Accordingly, the Deacon

and I selected the easiest one, engaged a guide, and prepared for

the ascent.

Monte Nuvolau is not a perilous mountain. I am quite sure that at

my present time of life I should be unwilling to ascend a perilous

mountain unless there were something extraordinarily desirable at

the top, or remarkably disagreeable at the bottom. Mere risk has

lost the attractions which it once had. As the father of a family

I felt bound to abstain from going for amusement into any place

which a Christian lady might not visit with propriety and safety.

Our preparation for Nuvolau, therefore, did not consist of ropes,

ice-irons, and axes, but simply of a lunch and two long sticks.

Our way led us, in the early morning, through the clustering houses

of Lacedel, up the broad, green slope that faces Cortina on the

west, to the beautiful Alp Pocol. Nothing could exceed the

pleasure of such a walk in the cool of the day, while the dew still

lies on the short, rich grass, and the myriads of flowers are at

their brightest and sweetest. The infinite variety and abundance

of the blossoms is a continual wonder. They are sown more thickly

than the stars in heaven, and the rainbow itself does not show so

many tints. Here they are mingled like the threads of some strange

embroidery; and there again nature has massed her colours; so that

one spot will be all pale blue with innumerable forget-me-nots, or

dark blue with gentians; another will blush with the delicate pink

of the Santa Lucia or the deeper red of the clover; and another

will shine yellow as cloth of gold. Over all this opulence of

bloom the larks were soaring and singing. I never heard so many as

in the meadows about Cortina. There was always a sweet spray of

music sprinkling down out of the sky, where the singers poised

unseen. It was like walking through a shower of melody.

From the Alp Pocol, which is simply a fair, lofty pasture, we had

our first full view of Nuvolau, rising bare and strong, like a huge

bastion, from the dark fir-woods. Through these our way led onward

now for seven miles, with but a slight ascent. Then turning off to

the left we began to climb sharply through the forest. There we

found abundance of the lovely Alpenrosen, which do not bloom on the

lower ground. Their colour is a deep, glowing pink, and when a

Tyrolese girl gives you one of these flowers to stick in the band

of your hat, you may know that you have found favour in her eyes.

Through the wood the cuckoo was calling--the bird which reverses

the law of good children, and insists on being heard, but not seen.

When the forest was at an end we found ourselves at the foot of an

alp which sloped steeply up to the Five Towers of Averau. The

effect of these enormous masses of rock, standing out in lonely

grandeur, like the ruins of some forsaken habitation of giants, was

tremendous. Seen from far below in the valley their form was

picturesque and striking; but as we sat beside the clear, cold

spring which gushes out at the foot of the largest tower, the

Titanic rocks seemed to hang in the air above us as if they would

overawe us into a sense of their majesty. We felt it to the full;

yet none the less, but rather the more, could we feel at the same

time the delicate and ethereal beauty of the fringed gentianella

and the pale Alpine lilies scattered on the short turf beside us.

We had now been on foot about three hours and a half. The half

hour that remained was the hardest. Up over loose, broken stones

that rolled beneath our feet, up over great slopes of rough rock,

up across little fields of snow where we paused to celebrate the

Fourth of July with a brief snowball fight, up along a narrowing

ridge with a precipice on either hand, and so at last to the

summit, 8600 feet above the sea.

It is not a great height, but it is a noble situation. For Nuvolau

is fortunately placed in the very centre of the Dolomites, and so

commands a finer view than many a higher mountain. Indeed, it is

not from the highest peaks, according to my experience, that one

gets the grandest prospects, but rather from those of middle

height, which are so isolated as to give a wide circle of vision,

and from which one can see both the valleys and the summits. Monte

Rosa itself gives a less imposing view than the Gorner Grat.

It is possible, in this world, to climb too high for pleasure.

But what a panorama Nuvolau gave us on that clear, radiant summer

morning--a perfect circle of splendid sight! On one side we looked

down upon the Five Towers; on the other, a thousand feet below, the

Alps, dotted with the huts of the herdsmen, sloped down into the

deep-cut vale of Agordo. Opposite to us was the enormous mass of

Tofana, a pile of gray and pink and saffron rock. When we turned

the other way, we faced a group of mountains as ragged as the

crests of a line of fir-trees, and behind them loomed the solemn

head of Pelmo. Across the broad vale of the Boite, Antelao stood

beside Sorapis, like a campanile beside a cathedral, and Cristallo

towered above the green pass of the Three Crosses. Through that

opening we could see the bristling peaks of the Sextenthal.

Sweeping around in a wider circle from that point, we saw, beyond

the Durrenstein, the snow-covered pile of the Gross-Glockner; the

crimson bastions of the Rothwand appeared to the north, behind

Tofana; then the white slopes that hang far away above the

Zillerthal; and, nearer, the Geislerspitze, like five fingers

thrust into the air; behind that, the distant Oetzthaler Mountain,

and just a single white glimpse of the highest peak of the Ortler

by the Engadine; nearer still we saw the vast fortress of the Sella

group and the red combs of the Rosengarten; Monte Marmolata, the

Queen of the Dolomites, stood before us revealed from base to peak

in a bridal dress of snow; and southward we looked into the dark

rugged face of La Civetta, rising sheer out of the vale of Agordo,

where the Lake of Alleghe slept unseen. It was a sea of mountains,

tossed around us into a myriad of motionless waves, and with a

rainbow of colours spread among their hollows and across their

crests. The cliffs of rose and orange and silver gray, the valleys

of deepest green, the distant shadows of purple and melting blue,

and the dazzling white of the scattered snow-fields seemed to shift

and vary like the hues on the inside of a shell. And over all,

from peak to peak, the light, feathery clouds went drifting lazily

and slowly, as if they could not leave a scene so fair.

There is barely room on the top of Nuvolau for the stone shelter-

hut which a grateful Saxon baron has built there as a sort of

votive offering for the recovery of his health among the mountains.

As we sat within and ate our frugal lunch, we were glad that he had

recovered his health, and glad that he had built the hut, and glad

that we had come to it. In fact, we could almost sympathise in our

cold, matter-of-fact American way with the sentimental German

inscription which we read on the wall:--

 Von Nuvolau's hohen Wolkenstufen

 Lass mich, Natur, durch deine Himmel rufen--

 An deiner Brust gesunde, wer da krank!

 So wird zum Volkerdank mein Sachsendank.

We refrained, however, from shouting anything through Nature's

heaven, but went lightly down, in about three hours, to supper in

the Star of Gold.

IV.

When a stern necessity forces one to leave Cortina, there are

several ways of departure. We selected the main highway for our

trunks, but for ourselves the Pass of the Three Crosses; the Deacon

and the Deaconess in a mountain waggon, and I on foot. It should

be written as an axiom in the philosophy of travel that the easiest

way is best for your luggage, and the hardest way is best for

yourself.

All along the rough road up to the Pass, we had a glorious outlook

backward over the Val d' Ampezzo, and when we came to the top, we

looked deep down into the narrow Val Buona behind Sorapis. I do

not know just when we passed the Austrian border, but when we came

to Lake Misurina we found ourselves in Italy again. My friends

went on down the valley to Landro, but I in my weakness, having

eaten of the trout of the lake for dinner, could not resist the

temptation of staying over-night to catch one for breakfast.

It was a pleasant failure. The lake was beautiful, lying on top of

the mountain like a bit of blue sky, surrounded by the peaks of

Cristallo, Cadino, and the Drei Zinnen. It was a happiness to

float on such celestial waters and cast the hopeful fly. The trout

were there; they were large; I saw them; they also saw me; but,

alas! I could not raise them. Misurina is, in fact, what the

Scotch call "a dour loch," one of those places which are outwardly

beautiful, but inwardly so demoralised that the trout will not

rise.

When we came ashore in the evening, the boatman consoled me with

the story of a French count who had spent two weeks there fishing,

and only caught one fish. I had some thoughts of staying thirteen

days longer, to rival the count, but concluded to go on the next

morning, over Monte Pian and the Cat's Ladder to Landro.

The view from Monte Pian is far less extensive than that from

Nuvolau; but it has the advantage of being very near the wild

jumble of the Sexten Dolomites. The Three Shoemakers and a lot

more of sharp and ragged fellows are close by, on the east; on the

west, Cristallo shows its fine little glacier, and Rothwand its

crimson cliffs; and southward Misurina gives to the view a glimpse

of water, without which, indeed, no view is complete. Moreover,

the mountain has the merit of being, as its name implies, quite

gentle. I met the Deacon and the Deaconess at the top, they having

walked up from Landro. And so we crossed the boundary line

together again, seven thousand feet above the sea, from Italy into

Austria. There was no custom-house.

The way down, by the Cat's Ladder, I travelled alone. The path was

very steep and little worn, but even on the mountain-side there was

no danger of losing it, for it had been blazed here and there, on

trees and stones, with a dash of blue paint. This is the work of

the invaluable DOAV--which is, being interpreted, the German-

Austrian Alpine Club. The more one travels in the mountains, the

more one learns to venerate this beneficent society, for the

shelter-huts and guide-posts it has erected, and the paths it has

made and marked distinctly with various colours. The Germans have

a genius for thoroughness. My little brown guide-book, for

example, not only informed me through whose back yard I must go to

get into a certain path, but it told me that in such and such a

spot I should find quite a good deal (ziemlichviel) of Edelweiss,

and in another a small echo; it advised me in one valley to take

provisions and dispense with a guide, and in another to take a

guide and dispense with provisions, adding varied information in

regard to beer, which in my case was useless, for I could not touch

it. To go astray under such auspices would be worse than

inexcusable.

Landro we found a very different place from Cortina. Instead of

having a large church and a number of small hotels, it consists

entirely of one large hotel and a very tiny church. It does not

lie in a broad, open basin, but in a narrow valley, shut in closely

by the mountains. The hotel, in spite of its size, is excellent,

and a few steps up the valley is one of the finest views in the

Dolomites. To the east opens a deep, wild gorge, at the head of

which the pinnacles of the Drei Zinnen are seen; to the south the

Durrensee fills the valley from edge to edge, and reflects in its

pale waters the huge bulk of Monte Cristallo. It is such a

complete picture, so finished, so compact, so balanced, that one

might think a painter had composed it in a moment of inspiration.

But no painter ever laid such colours on his canvas as those which

are seen here when the cool evening shadows have settled upon the

valley, all gray and green, while the mountains shine above in rosy

Alpenglow, as if transfigured with inward fire.

There is another lake, about three miles north of Landro, called

the Toblacher See, and there I repaired the defeat of Misurina.

The trout at the outlet, by the bridge, were very small, and while

the old fisherman was endeavouring to catch some of them in his new

net, which would not work, I pushed my boat up to the head of the

lake, where the stream came in. The green water was amazingly

clear, but the current kept the fish with their heads up stream; so

that one could come up behind them near enough for a long cast,

without being seen. As my fly lighted above them and came gently

down with the ripple, I saw the first fish turn and rise and take

it. A motion of the wrist hooked him, and he played just as gamely

as a trout in my favourite Long Island pond. How different the

colour, though, as he came out of the water. This fellow was all

silvery, with light pink spots on his sides. I took seven of his

companions, in weight some four pounds, and then stopped because

the evening light was failing.

How pleasant it is to fish in such a place and at such an hour!

The novelty of the scene, the grandeur of the landscape, lend a

strange charm to the sport. But the sport itself is so familiar

that one feels at home--the motion of the rod, the feathery swish

of the line, the sight of the rising fish--it all brings back a

hundred woodland memories, and thoughts of good fishing comrades,

some far away across the sea, and, perhaps, even now sitting around

the forest camp-fire in Maine or Canada, and some with whom we

shall keep company no more until we cross the greater ocean into

that happy country whither they have preceded us.

V.

Instead of going straight down the valley by the high road, a drive

of an hour, to the railway in the Pusterthal, I walked up over the

mountains to the east, across the Platzwiesen, and so down through

the Pragserthal. In one arm of the deep fir-clad vale are the

Baths of Alt-Prags, famous for having cured the Countess of Gorz of

a violent rheumatism in the fifteenth century. It is an antiquated

establishment, and the guests, who were walking about in the fields

or drinking their coffee in the balcony, had a fifteenth century

look about them--venerable but slightly ruinous. But perhaps that

was merely a rheumatic result.

All the waggons in the place were engaged. It is strange what an

aggravating effect this state of affairs has upon a pedestrian who

is bent upon riding. I did not recover my delight in the scenery

until I had walked about five miles farther, and sat down on the

grass, beside a beautiful spring, to eat my lunch.

What is there in a little physical rest that has such magic to

restore the sense of pleasure? A few moments ago nothing pleased

you--the bloom was gone from the peach; but now it has come back

again--you wonder and admire. Thus cheerful and contented I

trudged up the right arm of the valley to the Baths of Neu-Prags,

less venerable, but apparently more popular than Alt-Prags, and on

beyond them, through the woods, to the superb Pragser-Wildsee, a

lake whose still waters, now blue as sapphire under the clear sky,

and now green as emerald under gray clouds, sleep encircled by

mighty precipices. Could anything be a greater contrast with

Venice? There the canals alive with gondolas, and the open harbour

bright with many-coloured sails; here, the hidden lake, silent and

lifeless, save when

                     "A leaping fish

 Sends through the tarn a lonely cheer."

Tired, and a little foot-sore, after nine hours' walking, I came

into the big railway hotel at Toblach that night. There I met my

friends again, and parted from them and the Dolomites the next day,

with regret. For they were "stepping westward;" but in order to

get to the Gross-Venediger I must make a detour to the east,

through the Pusterthal, and come up through the valley of the Isel

to the great chain of mountains called the Hohe Tauern.

At the junction of the Isel and the Drau lies the quaint little

city of Lienz, with its two castles--the square, double-towered one

in the town, now transformed into the offices of the municipality,

and the huge mediaeval one on a hill outside, now used as a damp

restaurant and dismal beer-cellar. I lingered at Lienz for a

couple of days, in the ancient hostelry of the Post. The hallways

were vaulted like a cloister, the walls were three feet thick, the

kitchen was in the middle of the house on the second floor, so that

I looked into it every time I came from my room, and ordered dinner

direct from the cook. But, so far from being displeased with these

peculiarities, I rather liked the flavour of them; and then, in

addition, the landlady's daughter, who was managing the house, was

a person of most engaging manners, and there was trout and grayling

fishing in a stream near by, and the neighbouring church of Dolsach

contained the beautiful picture of the Holy Family, which Franz

Defregger painted for his native village.

The peasant women of Lienz have one very striking feature in their

dress--a black felt hat with a broad, stiff brim and a high crown,

smaller at the top than at the base. It looks a little like the

traditional head-gear of the Pilgrim Fathers, exaggerated. There

is a solemnity about it which is fatal to feminine beauty.

I went by the post-waggon, with two slow horses and ten passengers,

fifteen miles up the Iselthal, to Windisch-Matrei, a village whose

early history is lost in the mist of antiquity, and whose streets

are pervaded with odours which must have originated at the same

time with the village. One wishes that they also might have shared

the fate of its early history. But it is not fair to expect too

much of a small place, and Windisch-Matrei has certainly a

beautiful situation and a good inn. There I took my guide--a wiry

and companionable little man, whose occupation in the lower world

was that of a maker and merchant of hats--and set out for the

Pragerhutte, a shelter on the side of the Gross-Venediger.

The path led under the walls of the old Castle of Weissenstein, and

then in steep curves up the cliff which blocks the head of the

valley, and along a cut in the face of the rock, into the steep,

narrow Tauernthal, which divides the Glockner group from the

Venediger. How entirely different it was from the region of the

Dolomites! There the variety of colour was endless and the change

incessant; here it was all green grass and trees and black rocks,

with glimpses of snow. There the highest mountains were in sight

constantly; here they could only be seen from certain points in the

valley. There the streams played but a small part in the

landscape; here they were prominent, the main river raging and

foaming through the gorge below, while a score of waterfalls leaped

from the cliffs on either side and dashed down to join it.

The peasants, men, women and children, were cutting the grass in

the perpendicular fields; the woodmen were trimming and felling the

trees in the fir-forests; the cattle-tenders were driving their

cows along the stony path, or herding them far up on the hillsides.

It was a lonely scene, and yet a busy one; and all along the road

was written the history of the perils and hardships of the life

which now seemed so peaceful and picturesque under the summer

sunlight.

These heavy crosses, each covered with a narrow, pointed roof and

decorated with a rude picture, standing beside the path, or on the

bridge, or near the mill--what do they mean? They mark the place

where a human life has been lost, or where some poor peasant has

been delivered from a great peril, and has set up a memorial of his

gratitude.

Stop, traveller, as you pass by, and look at the pictures. They

have little more of art than a child's drawing on a slate; but they

will teach you what it means to earn a living in these mountains.

They tell of the danger that lurks on the steep slopes of grass,

where the mowers have to go down with ropes around their waists,

and in the beds of the streams where the floods sweep through in

the spring, and in the forests where the great trees fall and crush

men like flies, and on the icy bridges where a slip is fatal, and

on the high passes where the winter snowstorm blinds the eyes and

benumbs the limbs of the traveller, and under the cliffs from which

avalanches slide and rocks roll. They show you men and women

falling from waggons, and swept away by waters, and overwhelmed in

land-slips. In the corner of the picture you may see a peasant

with the black cross above his head--that means death. Or perhaps

it is deliverance that the tablet commemorates--and then you will

see the miller kneeling beside his mill with a flood rushing down

upon it, or a peasant kneeling in his harvest-field under an

inky-black cloud, or a landlord beside his inn in flames, or a

mother praying beside her sick children; and above appears an

angel, or a saint, or the Virgin with her Child.

Read the inscriptions, too, in their quaint German. Some of them

are as humourous as the epitaphs in New England graveyards. I

remember one which ran like this:

 Here lies Elias Queer,

 Killed in his sixtieth year;

 Scarce had he seen the light of day

 When a waggon-wheel crushed his life away.

And there is another famous one which says:

 Here perished the honoured and virtuous maiden,

 G.V.



 This tablet was erected by her only son.

But for the most part a glance at these Marterl und Taferl, which

are so frequent on all the mountain-roads of the Tyrol, will give

you a strange sense of the real pathos of human life. If you are a

Catholic, you will not refuse their request to say a prayer for the

departed; if you are a Protestant, at least it will not hurt you to

say one for those who still live and suffer and toil among such

dangers.

After we had walked for four hours up the Tauernthal, we came to

the Matreier-Tauernhaus, an inn which is kept open all the year for

the shelter of travellers over the high pass that crosses the

mountain-range at this point, from north to south. There we dined.

It was a bare, rude place, but the dish of juicy trout was

garnished with flowers, each fish holding a big pansy in its mouth,

and as the maid set them down before me she wished me "a good

appetite," with the hearty old-fashioned Tyrolese courtesy which

still survives in these remote valleys. It is pleasant to travel

in a land where the manners are plain and good. If you meet a

peasant on the road he says, "God greet you!" if you give a child a

couple of kreuzers he folds his hands and says, "God reward you!"

and the maid who lights you to bed says, "Goodnight, I hope you

will sleep well!"

Two hours more of walking brought us through Ausser-gschloss and

Inner-gschloss, two groups of herdsmen's huts, tenanted only in

summer, at the head of the Tauernthal. Midway between them lies a

little chapel, cut into the solid rock for shelter from the

avalanches. This lofty vale is indeed rightly named; for it is

shut off from the rest of the world. The portal is a cliff down

which the stream rushes in foam and thunder. On either hand rises

a mountain wall. Within, the pasture is fresh and green, sprinkled

with Alpine roses, and the pale river flows swiftly down between

the rows of dark wooden houses. At the head of the vale towers the

Gross-Venediger, with its glaciers and snow-fields dazzling white

against the deep blue heaven. The murmur of the stream and the

tinkle of the cow-bells and the jodelling of the herdsmen far up

the slopes, make the music for the scene.

The path from Gschloss leads straight up to the foot of the dark

pyramid of the Kesselkopf, and then in steep endless zig-zags along

the edge of the great glacier. I saw, at first, the pinnacles of

ice far above me, breaking over the face of the rock; then, after

an hour's breathless climbing, I could look right into the blue

crevasses; and at last, after another hour over soft snow-fields

and broken rocks, I was at the Pragerhut, perched on the shoulder

of the mountain, looking down upon the huge river of ice.

It was a magnificent view under the clear light of evening. Here

in front of us, the Venediger with all his brother-mountains

clustered about him; behind us, across the Tauern, the mighty chain

of the Glockner against the eastern sky.

This is the frozen world. Here the Winter, driven back into his

stronghold, makes his last stand against the Summer, in perpetual

conflict, retreating by day to the mountain-peak, but creeping back

at night in frost and snow to regain a little of his lost

territory, until at last the Summer is wearied out, and the Winter

sweeps down again to claim the whole valley for his own.

VI.

In the Pragerhut I found mountain comfort. There were bunks along

the wall of the guest-room, with plenty of blankets. There was

good store of eggs, canned meats, and nourishing black bread. The

friendly goats came bleating up to the door at nightfall to be

milked. And in charge of all this luxury there was a cheerful

peasant-wife with her brown-eyed daughter, to entertain travellers.

It was a pleasant sight to see them, as they sat down to their

supper with my guide; all three bowed their heads and said their

"grace before meat," the guide repeating the longer prayer and the

mother and daughter coming in with the responses. I went to bed

with a warm and comfortable feeling about my heart. It was a good

ending for the day. In the morning, if the weather remained clear,

the alarm-clock was to wake us at three for the ascent to the

summit.

But can it be three o'clock already. The gibbous moon still hangs

in the sky and casts a feeble light over the scene. Then up and

away for the final climb. How rough the path is among the black

rocks along the ridge! Now we strike out on the gently rising

glacier, across the crust of snow, picking our way among the

crevasses, with the rope tied about our waists for fear of a fall.

How cold it is! But now the gray light of morning dawns, and now

the beams of sunrise shoot up behind the Glockner, and now the sun

itself glitters into sight. The snow grows softer as we toil up

the steep, narrow comb between the Gross-Venediger and his

neighbour the Klein-Venediger. At last we have reached our

journey's end. See, the whole of the Tyrol is spread out before us

in wondrous splendour, as we stand on this snowy ridge; and at our

feet the Schlatten glacier, like a long, white snake, curls down

into the valley.

There is still a little peak above us; an overhanging horn of snow

which the wind has built against the mountain-top. I would like to

stand there, just for a moment. The guide protests it would be

dangerous, for if the snow should break it would be a fall of a

thousand feet to the glacier on the northern side. But let us dare

the few steps upward. How our feet sink! Is the snow slipping?

Look at the glacier! What is happening? It is wrinkling and

curling backward on us, serpent-like. Its head rises far above us.

All its icy crests are clashing together like the ringing of a

thousand bells. We are falling! I fling out my arm to grasp the

guide--and awake to find myself clutching a pillow in the bunk.

The alarm-clock is ringing fiercely for three o'clock. A driving

snow-storm is beating against the window. The ground is white.

Peer through the clouds as I may, I cannot even catch a glimpse of

the vanished Gross-Venediger.

AU LARGE

Wherever we strayed, the same tranquil leisure enfolded us; day

followed day in an order unbroken and peaceful as the unfolding of

the flowers and the silent march of the stars. Time no longer ran

like the few sands in a delicate hour-glass held by a fragile human

hand, but like a majestic river fed by fathomless seas. . . . We

gave ourselves up to the sweetness of that unmeasured life, without

thought of yesterday or to-morrow; we drank the cup to-day held to

our lips, and knew that so long as we were athirst that draught

would not be denied us." --HAMILTON W. MABIE: Under the Trees.

There is magic in words, surely, and many a treasure besides Ali

Baba's is unlocked with a verbal key. Some charm in the mere

sound, some association with the pleasant past, touches a secret

spring. The bars are down; the gate open; you are made free of all

the fields of memory and fancy--by a word.

Au large! Envoyez au large! is the cry of the Canadian voyageurs as

they thrust their paddles against the shore and push out on the

broad lake for a journey through the wilderness. Au large! is what

the man in the bow shouts to the man in the stern when the birch

canoe is running down the rapids, and the water grows too broken,

and the rocks too thick, along the river-bank. Then the frail bark

must be driven out into the very centre of the wild current, into

the midst of danger to find safety, dashing, like a frightened

colt, along the smooth, sloping lane bordered by white fences of

foam.

Au large! When I hear that word, I hear also the crisp waves

breaking on pebbly beaches, and the big wind rushing through

innumerable trees, and the roar of headlong rivers leaping down the

rocks, I see long reaches of water sparkling in the sun, or

sleeping still between evergreen walls beneath a cloudy sky; and

the gleam of white tents on the shore; and the glow of firelight

dancing through the woods. I smell the delicate vanishing perfume

of forest flowers; and the incense of rolls of birch-bark,

crinkling and flaring in the camp-fire; and the soothing odour of

balsam-boughs piled deep for woodland beds--the veritable and only

genuine perfume of the land of Nod. The thin shining veil of the

Northern lights waves and fades and brightens over the night sky;

at the sound of the word, as at the ringing of a bell, the curtain

rises. Scene, the Forest of Arden; enter a party of hunters.

It was in the Lake St. John country, two hundred miles north of

Quebec, that I first heard my rustic incantation; and it seemed to

fit the region as if it had been made for it. This is not a little

pocket wilderness like the Adirondacks, but something vast and

primitive. You do not cross it, from one railroad to another, by a

line of hotels. You go into it by one river as far as you like, or

dare; and then you turn and come back again by another river,

making haste to get out before your provisions are exhausted. The

lake itself is the cradle of the mighty Saguenay: an inland sea,

thirty miles across and nearly round, lying in the broad limestone

basin north of the Laurentian Mountains. The southern and eastern

shores have been settled for twenty or thirty years; and the rich

farm-land yields abundant crops of wheat and oats and potatoes to a

community of industrious habitants, who live in little modern

villages, named after the saints and gathered as closely as

possible around big gray stone churches, and thank the good Lord

that he has given them a climate at least four or five degrees

milder than Quebec. A railroad, built through a region of granite

hills, which will never be tamed to the plough, links this outlying

settlement to the civilised world; and at the end of the railroad

the Hotel Roberval, standing on a hill above the lake, offers to

the pampered tourist electric lights, and spring-beds, and a wide

veranda from which he can look out across the water into the face

of the wilderness.

Northward and westward the interminable forest rolls away to the

shores of Hudson's Bay and the frozen wastes of Labrador. It is an

immense solitude. A score of rivers empty into the lake; little

ones like the Pikouabi and La Pipe, and middle-sized ones like the

Ouiatehouan and La Belle Riviere, and big ones like the Mistassini

and the Peribonca; and each of these streams is the clue to a

labyrinth of woods and waters. The canoe-man who follows it far

enough will find himself among lakes that are not named on any map;

he will camp on virgin ground, and make the acquaintance of

unsophisticated fish; perhaps even, like the maiden in the fairy-

tale, he will meet with the little bear, and the middle-sized bear,

and the great big bear.

Damon and I set out on such an expedition shortly after the nodding

lilies in the Connecticut meadows had rung the noon-tide bell of

summer, and when the raspberry bushes along the line of the Quebec

and Lake St. John Railway had spread their afternoon collation for

birds and men. At Roberval we found our four guides waiting for

us, and the steamboat took us all across the lake to the Island

House, at the northeast corner. There we embarked our tents and

blankets, our pots and pans, and bags of flour and potatoes and

bacon and other delicacies, our rods and guns, and last, but not

least, our axes (without which man in the woods is a helpless

creature), in two birch-bark canoes, and went flying down the

Grande Decharge.

It is a wonderful place, this outlet of Lake St. John. All the

floods of twenty rivers are gathered here, and break forth through

a net of islands in a double stream, divided by the broad Ile

d'Alma, into the Grande Decharge and the Petite Decharge. The

southern outlet is small, and flows somewhat more quietly at first.

But the northern outlet is a huge confluence and tumult of waters.

You see the set of the tide far out in the lake, sliding, driving,

crowding, hurrying in with smooth currents and swirling eddies,

toward the corner of escape. By the rocky cove where the Island

House peers out through the fir-trees, the current already has a

perceptible slope. It begins to boil over hidden stones in the

middle, and gurgles at projecting points of rock. A mile farther

down there is an islet where the stream quickens, chafes, and

breaks into a rapid. Behind the islet it drops down in three or

four foaming steps. On the outside it makes one long, straight

rush into a line of white-crested standing waves.

As we approached, the steersman in the first canoe stood up to look

over the course. The sea was high. Was it too high? The canoes

were heavily loaded. Could they leap the waves? There was a quick

talk among the guides as we slipped along, undecided which way to

turn. Then the question seemed to settle itself, as most of these

woodland questions do, as if some silent force of Nature had the

casting-vote. "Sautez, sautez!" cried Ferdinand, "envoyez au

large!" In a moment we were sliding down the smooth back of the

rapid, directly toward the first big wave. The rocky shore went by

us like a dream; we could feel the motion of the earth whirling

around with us. The crest of the billow in front curled above the

bow of the canoe. "Arret', arret', doucement!" A swift stroke of

the paddle checked the canoe, quivering and prancing like a horse

suddenly reined in. The wave ahead, as if surprised, sank and

flattened for a second. The canoe leaped through the edge of it,

swerved to one side, and ran gayly down along the fringe of the

line of billows, into quieter water.

Every one feels the exhilaration of such a descent. I know a lady

who almost cried with fright when she went down her first rapid,

but before the voyage was ended she was saying:--

"Count that day lost whose low, descending sun

 Sees no fall leaped, no foaming rapid run."

It takes a touch of danger to bring out the joy of life.

Our guides began to shout, and joke each other, and praise their

canoes.

"You grazed that villain rock at the corner," said Jean; "didn't

you know where it was?"

"Yes, after I touched it," cried Ferdinand; "but you took in a

bucket of water, and I suppose your m'sieu' is sitting on a piece

of the river. Is it not?"

This seemed to us all a very merry jest, and we laughed with the

same inextinguishable laughter which a practical joke, according to

Homer, always used to raise in Olympus. It is one of the charms of

life in the woods that it brings back the high spirits of boyhood

and renews the youth of the world. Plain fun, like plain food,

tastes good out-of-doors. Nectar is the sweet sap of a maple-tree.

Ambrosia is only another name for well-turned flapjacks. And all

the immortals, sitting around the table of golden cedar-slabs, make

merry when the clumsy Hephaistos, playing the part of Hebe,

stumbles over a root and upsets the plate of cakes into the fire.

The first little rapid of the Grande Decharge was only the

beginning. Half a mile below we could see the river disappear

between two points of rock. There was a roar of conflict, and a

golden mist hanging in the air, like the smoke of battle. All

along the place where the river sank from sight, dazzling heads of

foam were flashing up and falling back, as if a horde of water-

sprites were vainly trying to fight their way up to the lake. It

was the top of the grande chute, a wild succession of falls and

pools where no boat could live for a moment. We ran down toward it

as far as the water served, and then turned off among the rocks on

the left hand, to take the portage.

These portages are among the troublesome delights of a journey in

the wilderness. To the guides they mean hard work, for everything,

including the boats, must be carried on their backs. The march of

the canoes on dry land is a curious sight. Andrew Marvell

described it two hundred years ago when he was poetizing beside the

little river Wharfe in Yorkshire:--

"And now the salmon-fishers moist

 Their leathern boats begin to hoist,

 And like antipodes in shoes

 Have shod their heads in their canoes.

 How tortoise-like, but none so slow,

 These rational amphibii go!"

But the sportsman carries nothing, except perhaps his gun, or his

rod, or his photographic camera; and so for him the portage is only

a pleasant opportunity to stretch his legs, cramped by sitting in

the canoe, and to renew his acquaintance with the pretty things

that are in the woods.

We sauntered along the trail, Damon and I, as if school were out

and would never keep again. How fresh and tonic the forest seemed

as we plunged into its bath of shade. There were our old friends

the cedars, with their roots twisted across the path; and the white

birches, so trim in youth and so shaggy in age; and the sociable

spruces and balsams, crowding close together, and interlacing their

arms overhead. There were the little springs, trickling through

the moss; and the slippery logs laid across the marshy places; and

the fallen trees, cut in two and pushed aside,--for this was a

much-travelled portage.

Around the open spaces, the tall meadow-rue stood dressed in robes

of fairy white and green. The blue banners of the fleur-de-lis

were planted beside the springs. In shady corners, deeper in the

wood, the fragrant pyrola lifted its scape of clustering bells,

like a lily of the valley wandered to the forest. When we came to

the end of the portage, a perfume like that of cyclamens in

Tyrolean meadows welcomed us, and searching among the loose grasses

by the water-side we found the exquisite purple spikes of the

lesser fringed orchis, loveliest and most ethereal of all the

woodland flowers save one. And what one is that? Ah, my friend,

it is your own particular favourite, the flower, by whatever name

you call it, that you plucked long ago when you were walking in the

forest with your sweetheart,--

"Im wunderschonen Monat Mai

 Als alle Knospen sprangen."

We launched our canoes again on the great pool at the foot of the

first fall,--a broad sweep of water a mile long and half a mile

wide, full of eddies and strong currents, and covered with drifting

foam. There was the old campground on the point, where I had

tented so often with my lady Greygown, fishing for ouananiche, the

famous land-locked salmon of Lake St. John. And there were the big

fish, showing their back fins as they circled lazily around in the

eddies, as if they were waiting to play with us. But the goal of

our day's journey was miles away, and we swept along with the

stream, now through a rush of quick water, boiling and foaming, now

through a still place like a lake, now through

                "Fairy crowds

 Of islands, that together lie,

 As quietly as spots of sky

 Among the evening clouds."

The beauty of the shores was infinitely varied, and unspoiled by

any sign of the presence of man. We met no company except a few

king-fishers, and a pair of gulls who had come up from the sea to

spend the summer, and a large flock of wild ducks, which the guides

call "Betseys," as if they were all of the gentler sex. In such a

big family of girls we supposed that a few would not be missed, and

Damon bagged two of the tenderest for our supper.

In the still water at the mouth of the Riviere Mistook, just above

the Rapide aux Cedres, we went ashore on a level wooded bank to

make our first camp and cook our dinner. Let me try to sketch our

men as they are busied about the fire.

They are all French Canadians of unmixed blood, descendants of the

men who came to New France with Samuel de Champlain, that

incomparable old woodsman and life-long lover of the wilderness.

Ferdinand Larouche is our chef--there must be a head in every party

for the sake of harmony--and his assistant is his brother Francois.

Ferdinand is a stocky little fellow, a "sawed off" man, not more

than five feet two inches tall, but every inch of him is pure vim.

He can carry a big canoe or a hundred-weight of camp stuff over a

mile portage without stopping to take breath. He is a capital

canoe-man, with prudence enough to balance his courage, and a fair

cook, with plenty of that quality which is wanting in the ordinary

cook of commerce--good humour. Always joking, whistling, singing,

he brings the atmosphere of a perpetual holiday along with him.

His weather-worn coat covers a heart full of music. He has two

talents which make him a marked man among his comrades. He plays

the fiddle to the delight of all the balls and weddings through the

country-side; and he speaks English to the admiration and envy of

the other guides. But like all men of genius he is modest about

his accomplishments. "H'I not spik good h'English--h'only for

camp--fishin', cookin', dhe voyage--h'all dhose t'ings." The

aspirates puzzle him. He can get though a slash of fallen timber

more easily than a sentence full of "this" and "that." Sometimes

he expresses his meaning queerly. He was telling me once about his

farm, "not far off here, in dhe Riviere au Cochon, river of dhe

pig, you call 'im. H'I am a widow, got five sons, t'ree of dhem

are girls." But he usually ends by falling back into French,

which, he assures you, you speak to perfection, "much better than

the Canadians; the French of Paris in short--M'sieu' has been in

Paris?" Such courtesy is born in the blood, and is irresistible.

You cannot help returning the compliment and assuring him that his

English is remarkable, good enough for all practical purposes,

better than any of the other guides can speak. And so it is.

Francois is a little taller, a little thinner, and considerably

quieter than Ferdinand. He laughs loyally at his brother's jokes,

and sings the response to his songs, and wields a good second

paddle in the canoe.

Jean--commonly called Johnny--Morel is a tall, strong man of fifty,

with a bushy red beard that would do credit to a pirate. But when

you look at him more closely, you see that he has a clear, kind

blue eye and a most honest, friendly face under his slouch hat. He

has travelled these woods and waters for thirty years, so that he

knows the way through them by a thousand familiar signs, as well as

you know the streets of the city. He is our pathfinder.

The bow paddle in his canoe is held by his son Joseph, a lad not

quite fifteen, but already as tall, and almost as strong as a man.

"He is yet of the youth," said Johnny, "and he knows not the

affairs of the camp. This trip is for him the first--it is his

school--but I hope he will content you. He is good, M'sieu', and

of the strongest for his age. I have educated already two sons in

the bow of my canoe. The oldest has gone to Pennsylvanie; he peels

the bark there for the tanning of leather. The second had the

misfortune of breaking his leg, so that he can no longer kneel to

paddle. He has descended to the making of shoes. Joseph is my

third pupil. And I have still a younger one at home waiting to

come into my school."

A touch of family life like that is always refreshing, and doubly

so in the wilderness. For what is fatherhood at its best,

everywhere, but the training of good men to take the teacher's

place when his work is done? Some day, when Johnny's rheumatism

has made his joints a little stiffer and his eyes have lost

something of their keenness, he will be wielding the second paddle

in the boat, and going out only on the short and easy trips. It

will be young Joseph that steers the canoe through the dangerous

places, and carries the heaviest load over the portages, and leads

the way on the long journeys.

It has taken me longer to describe our men than it took them to

prepare our frugal meal: a pot of tea, the woodsman's favourite

drink, (I never knew a good guide that would not go without whisky

rather than without tea,) a few slices of toast and juicy rashers

of bacon, a kettle of boiled potatoes, and a relish of crackers and

cheese. We were in a hurry to be off for an afternoon's fishing,

three or four miles down the river, at the Ile Maligne.

The island is well named, for it is the most perilous place on the

river, and has a record of disaster and death. The scattered

waters of the Discharge are drawn together here into one deep,

narrow, powerful stream, flowing between gloomy shores of granite.

In mid-channel the wicked island shows its scarred and bristling

head, like a giant ready to dispute the passage. The river rushes

straight at the rocky brow, splits into two currents, and raves

away on both sides of the island in a double chain of furious falls

and rapids.

In these wild waters we fished with immense delight and fair

success, scrambling down among the huge rocks along the shore, and

joining the excitement of an Alpine climb with the placid pleasures

of angling. At nightfall we were at home again in our camp, with

half a score of onananiche, weighing from one to four pounds each.

Our next day's journey was long and variegated. A portage of a

mile or two across the Ile d'Alma, with a cart to haul our canoes

and stuff, brought us to the Little Discharge, down which we

floated for a little way, and then hauled through the village of

St. Joseph to the foot of the Carcajou, or Wildcat Falls. A mile

of quick water was soon passed, and we came to the junction of the

Little Discharge with the Grand Discharge at the point where the

picturesque club-house stands in a grove of birches beside the big

Vache Caille Falls. It is lively work crossing the pool here, when

the water is high and the canoes are heavy; but we went through the

labouring seas safely, and landed some distance below, at the head

of the Rapide Gervais, to eat our lunch. The water was too rough

to run down with loaded boats, so Damon and I had to walk about

three miles along the river-bank, while the men went down with the

canoes.

On our way beside the rapids, Damon geologised, finding the marks

of ancient glaciers, and bits of iron-ore, and pockets of sand full

of infinitesimal garnets, and specks of gold washed from the

primitive granite; and I fished, picking up a pair of ouananiche in

foam-covered nooks among the rocks. The swift water was almost

passed when we embarked again and ran down the last slope into a

long deadwater.

The shores, at first bold and rough, covered with dense thickets of

second-growth timber, now became smoother and more fertile.

Scattered farms, with square, unpainted houses, and long, thatched

barns, began to creep over the hills toward the river. There was a

hamlet, called St. Charles, with a rude little church and a

campanile of logs. The cure, robed in decent black and wearing a

tall silk hat of the vintage of 1860, sat on the veranda of his

trim presbytery, looking down upon us, like an image of propriety

smiling at Bohemianism. Other craft appeared on the river. A man

and his wife paddling an old dugout, with half a dozen children

packed in amidships a crew of lumbermen, in a sharp-nosed bateau,

picking up stray logs along the banks; a couple of boatloads of

young people returning merrily from a holiday visit; a party of

berry-pickers in a flat-bottomed skiff; all the life of the

country-side was in evidence on the river. We felt quite as if we

had been "in the swim" of society, when at length we reached the

point where the Riviere des Aunes came tumbling down a hundred-foot

ladder of broken black rocks. There we pitched our tents in a

strip of meadow by the water-side, where we could have the sound of

the falls for a slumber-song all night and the whole river for a

bath at sunrise.

A sparkling draught of crystal weather was poured into our stirrup-

cup in the morning, as we set out for a drive of fifteen miles

across country to the Riviere a l'Ours, a tributary of the crooked,

unnavigable river of Alders. The canoes and luggage were loaded on

a couple of charrettes, or two-wheeled carts. But for us and the

guides there were two quatre-roues, the typical vehicles of the

century, as characteristic of Canada as the carriole is of Norway.

It is a two-seated buckboard, drawn by one horse, and the back seat

is covered with a hood like an old-fashioned poke bonnet. The road

is of clay and always rutty. It runs level for a while, and then

jumps up a steep ridge and down again, or into a deep gully and out

again. The habitant's idea of good driving is to let his horse

slide down the hill and gallop up. This imparts a spasmodic

quality to the motion, like Carlyle's style.

The native houses are strung along the road. The modern pattern

has a convex angle in the roof, and dormer-windows; it is a rustic

adaptation of the Mansard. The antique pattern, which is far more

picturesque, has a concave curve in the roof, and the eaves project

like eyebrows, shading the flatness of the face. Paint is a

rarity. The prevailing colour is the soft gray of weather-beaten

wood. Sometimes, in the better class of houses, a gallery is built

across the front and around one side, and a square of garden is

fenced in, with dahlias and hollyhocks and marigolds, and perhaps a

struggling rosebush, and usually a small patch of tobacco growing

in one corner. Once in a long while you may see a balm-of-Gilead

tree, or a clump of sapling poplars, planted near the door.

How much better it would have been if the farmer had left a few of

the noble forest-trees to shade his house. But then, when the

farmer came into the wilderness he was not a farmer, he was first

of all a wood-chopper. He regarded the forest as a stubborn enemy

in possession of his land. He attacked it with fire and axe and

exterminated it, instead of keeping a few captives to hold their

green umbrellas over his head when at last his grain fields should

be smiling around him and he should sit down on his doorstep to

smoke a pipe of home-grown tobacco.

In the time of adversity one should prepare for prosperity. I

fancy there are a good many people unconsciously repeating the

mistake of the Canadian farmer--chopping down all the native

growths of life, clearing the ground of all the useless pretty

things that seem to cumber it, sacrificing everything to utility

and success. We fell the last green tree for the sake of raising

an extra hill of potatoes; and never stop to think what an ugly,

barren place we may have to sit in while we eat them. The ideals,

the attachments--yes, even the dreams of youth are worth saving.

For the artificial tastes with which age tries to make good their

loss grow very slowly and cast but a slender shade.

Most of the Canadian farmhouses have their ovens out-of-doors. We

saw them everywhere; rounded edifices of clay, raised on a

foundation of logs, and usually covered with a pointed roof of

boards. They looked like little family chapels--and so they were;

shrines where the ritual of the good housewife was celebrated, and

the gift of daily bread, having been honestly earned, was

thankfully received.

At one house we noticed a curious fragment of domestic economy.

Half a pig was suspended over the chimney, and the smoke of the

summer fire was turned to account in curing the winter's meat. I

guess the children of that family had a peculiar fondness for the

parental roof-tree. We saw them making mud-pies in the road, and

imagined that they looked lovingly up at the pendent porker,

outlined against the sky,--a sign of promise, prophetic of bacon.

About noon the road passed beyond the region of habitation into a

barren land, where blueberries were the only crop, and partridges

took the place of chickens. Through this rolling gravelly plain,

sparsely wooded and glowing with the tall magenta bloom of the

fireweed, we drove toward the mountains, until the road went to

seed and we could follow it no longer. Then we took to the water

and began to pole our canoes up the River of the Bear. It was a

clear, amber-coloured stream, not more than ten or fifteen yards

wide, running swift and strong, over beds of sand and rounded

pebbles. The canoes went wallowing and plunging up the narrow

channel, between thick banks of alders, like clumsy sea-monsters.

All the grace with which they move under the strokes of the paddle,

in large waters, was gone. They looked uncouth and predatory, like

a pair of seals that I once saw swimming far up the river

Ristigouche in chase of fish. From the bow of each canoe the

landing-net stuck out as a symbol of destruction--after the fashion

of the Dutch admiral who nailed a broom to his masthead. But it

would have been impossible to sweep the trout out of that little

river by any fair method of angling, for there were millions of

them; not large, but lively, and brilliant, and fat; they leaped in

every bend of the stream. We trailed our flies, and made quick

casts here and there, as we went along. It was fishing on the

wing. And when we pitched our tents in a hurry at nightfall on the

low shore of Lac Sale, among the bushes where firewood was scarce

and there were no sapins for the beds, we were comforted for the

poorness of the camp-ground by the excellence of the trout supper.

It was a bitter cold night for August. There was a skin of ice on

the water-pail at daybreak. We were glad to be up and away for an

early start. The river grew wilder and more difficult. There were

rapids, and ruined dams built by the lumbermen years ago. At these

places the trout were larger, and so plentiful that it was easy to

hook two at a cast. It came on to rain furiously while we were

eating our lunch. But we did not seem to mind it any more than the

fish did. Here and there the river was completely blocked by

fallen trees. The guides called it bouchee, "corked," and leaped

out gayly into the water with their axes to "uncork" it. We passed

through some pretty lakes, unknown to the map-makers, and arrived,

before sundown, at the Lake of the Bear, where we were to spend a

couple of days. The lake was full of floating logs, and the water,

raised by the heavy rains and the operations of the lumbermen, was

several feet above its usual level. Nature's landing-places were

all blotted out, and we had to explore halfway around the shore

before we could get out comfortably. We raised the tents on a

small shoulder of a hill, a few rods above the water; and a

glorious camp-fire of birch logs soon made us forget our misery as

though it had not been.

The name of the Lake of the Beautiful Trout made us desire to visit

it. The portage was said to be only fifty acres long (the arpent

is the popular measure of distance here), but it passed over a

ridge of newly burned land, and was so entangled with ruined woods

and desolate of birds and flowers that it seemed to us at least

five miles. The lake was charming--a sheet of singularly clear

water, of a pale green tinge, surrounded by wooded hills. In the

translucent depths trout and pike live together, but whether in

peace or not I cannot tell. Both of them grow to an enormous size,

but the pike are larger and have more capacious jaws. One of them

broke my tackle and went off with a silver spoon in his mouth, as

if he had been born to it. Of course the guides vowed that they

saw him as he passed under the canoe, and declared that he must

weigh thirty or forty pounds. The spectacles of regret always

magnify.

The trout were coy. We took only five of them, perfect specimens

of the true Salvelinus fontinalis, with square tails, and carmine

spots on their dark, mottled sides; the largest weighed three

pounds and three-quarters, and the others were almost as heavy.

On our way back to the camp we found the portage beset by

innumerable and bloodthirsty foes. There are four grades of insect

malignity in the woods. The mildest is represented by the winged

idiot that John Burroughs' little boy called a "blunderhead." He

dances stupidly before your face, as if lost in admiration, and

finishes his pointless tale by getting in your eye, or down your

throat. The next grade is represented by the midges. "Bite 'em no

see 'em," is the Indian name for these invisible atoms of animated

pepper which settle upon you in the twilight and make your skin

burn like fire. But their hour is brief, and when they depart they

leave not a bump behind. One step lower in the scale we find the

mosquito, or rather he finds us, and makes his poisoned mark upon

our skin. But after all, he has his good qualities. The mosquito

is a gentlemanly pirate. He carries his weapon openly, and gives

notice of an attack. He respects the decencies of life, and does

not strike below the belt, or creep down the back of your neck.

But the black fly is at the bottom of the moral scale. He is an

unmitigated ruffian, the plug-ugly of the woods. He looks like a

tiny, immature house-fly, with white legs as if he must be

innocent. But, in fact, he crawls like a serpent and bites like a

dog. No portion of the human frame is sacred from his greed. He

takes his pound of flesh anywhere, and does not scruple to take the

blood with it. As a rule you can defend yourself, to some degree,

against him, by wearing a head-net, tying your sleeves around your

wrists and your trousers around your ankles, and anointing yourself

with grease, flavoured with pennyroyal, for which cleanly and

honest scent he has a coarse aversion. But sometimes, especially

on burned land, about the middle of a warm afternoon, when a rain

is threatening, the horde of black flies descend in force and fury

knowing that their time is short. Then there is no escape. Suits

of chain armour, Nubian ointments of far-smelling potency, would

not save you. You must do as our guides did on the portage, submit

to fate and walk along in heroic silence, like Marco Bozzaris

"bleeding at every pore,"--or do as Damon and I did, break into

ejaculations and a run, until you reach a place where you can light

a smudge and hold your head over it.

"And yet," said my comrade, as we sat coughing and rubbing our eyes

in the painful shelter of the smoke, "there are worse trials than

this in the civilised districts: social enmities, and newspaper

scandals, and religious persecutions. The blackest fly I ever saw

is the Reverend -----" but here his voice was fortunately choked by

a fit of coughing.

A couple of wandering Indians--descendants of the Montagnais, on

whose hunting domain we were travelling--dropped in at our camp

that night as we sat around the fire. They gave us the latest news

about the portages on our further journey; how far they had been

blocked with fallen trees, and whether the water was high or low in

the rivers--just as a visitor at home would talk about the effect

of the strikes on the stock market, and the prospects of the newest

organization of the non-voting classes for the overthrow of Tammany

Hall. Every phase of civilisation or barbarism creates its own

conversational currency. The weather, like the old Spanish dollar,

is the only coin that passes everywhere.

But our Indians did not carry much small change about them. They

were dark, silent chaps, soon talked out; and then they sat sucking

their pipes before the fire, (as dumb as their own wooden effigies

in front of a tobacconist's shop,) until the spirit moved them, and

they vanished in their canoe down the dark lake. Our own guides

were very different. They were as full of conversation as a

spruce-tree is of gum. When all shallower themes were exhausted

they would discourse of bears and canoes and lumber and fish,

forever. After Damon and I had left the fire and rolled ourselves

in the blankets in our own tent, we could hear the men going on and

on with their simple jests and endless tales of adventure, until

sleep drowned their voices.

It was the sound of a French chanson that woke us early on the

morning of our departure from the Lake of the Bear. A gang of

lumbermen were bringing a lot of logs through the lake. Half-

hidden in the cold gray mist that usually betokens a fine day, and

wet to the waist from splashing about after their unwieldy flock,

these rough fellows were singing at their work as cheerfully as a

party of robins in a cherry-tree at sunrise. It was like the

miller and the two girls whom Wordsworth saw dancing in their boats

on the Thames:

         "They dance not for me,

          Yet mine is their glee!

 Thus pleasure is spread through the earth

   In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find;

   Thus a rich loving-kindness, redundantly kind,

 Moves all nature to gladness and mirth."

But our later thoughts of the lumbermen were not altogether

grateful, when we arrived that day, after a mile of portage, at the

little Riviere Blanche, upon which we had counted to float us down

to Lac Tchitagama, and found that they had stolen all its water to

float their logs down the Lake of the Bear. The poor little river

was as dry as a theological novel. There was nothing left of it

except the bed and the bones; it was like a Connecticut stream in

the middle of August. All its pretty secrets were laid bare; all

its music was hushed. The pools that lingered among the rocks

seemed like big tears; and the voice of the forlorn rivulets that

trickled in here and there, seeking the parent stream, was a voice

of weeping and complaint.

For us the loss meant a hard day's work, scrambling over slippery

stones, and splashing through puddles, and forcing a way through

the tangled thickets on the bank, instead of a pleasant two hours'

run on a swift current. We ate our dinner on a sandbank in what

was once the middle of a pretty pond; and entered, as the sun was

sinking, a narrow wooded gorge between the hills, completely filled

by a chain of small lakes, where travelling became easy and

pleasant. The steep shores, clothed with cedar and black spruce

and dark-blue fir-trees, rose sheer from the water; the passage

from lake to lake was a tiny rapid a few yards long, gurgling

through mossy rocks; at the foot of the chain there was a longer

rapid, with a portage beside it. We emerged from the dense bush

suddenly and found ourselves face to face with Lake Tchitagama.

How the heart expands at such a view! Nine miles of shining water

lay stretched before us, opening through the mountains that guarded

it on both sides with lofty walls of green and gray, ridge over

ridge, point beyond point, until the vista ended in

"You orange sunset waning slow."

At a moment like this one feels a sense of exultation. It is a new

discovery of the joy of living. And yet, my friend and I confessed

to each other, there was a tinge of sadness, an inexplicable regret

mingled with our joy. Was it the thought of how few human eyes had

even seen that lovely vision? Was it the dim foreboding that we

might never see it again? Who can explain the secret pathos of

Nature's loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from

our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise.

It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would

not be fit to enjoy it perfectly, nor stay in it forever.

Our first camp on Tchitagama was at the sunrise end of the lake, in

a bay paved with small round stones, laid close together and beaten

firmly down by the waves. There, and along the shores below, at

the mouth of a little river that foamed in over a ledge of granite,

and in the shadow of cliffs of limestone and feldspar, we trolled

and took many fish: pike of enormous size, fresh-water sharks,

devourers of nobler game, fit only to kill and throw away; huge old

trout of six or seven pounds, with broad tails and hooked jaws,

fine fighters and poor food; stupid, wide-mouthed chub--ouitouche,

the Indians call them--biting at hooks that were not baited for

them; and best of all, high-bred onananiche, pleasant to capture

and delicate to eat.

Our second camp was on a sandy point at the sunset end of the lake--

a fine place for bathing, and convenient to the wild meadows and

blueberry patches, where Damon went to hunt for bears. He did not

find any; but once he heard a great noise in the bushes, which he

thought was a bear; and he declared that he got quite as much

excitement out of it as if it had had four legs and a mouthful of

teeth.

He brought back from one of his expeditions an Indian letter, which

he had found in a cleft stick by the river. It was a sheet of

birch-bark with a picture drawn on it in charcoal; five Indians in

a canoe paddling up the river, and one in another canoe pointing in

another direction; we read it as a message left by a hunting party,

telling their companions not to go on up the river, because it was

already occupied, but to turn off on a side stream.

There was a sign of a different kind nailed to an old stump behind

our camp. It was the top of a soap-box, with an inscription after

this fashion:

   A.D. MEYER & B. LEVIT

      Soap Mfrs. N. Y.

   CAMPED HERE JULY 18--

1 TROUT 17 1/2 POUNDS. II OUAN

ANISHES 18 1/2 POUNDS. ONE

     PIKE 147 1/2 LBS.

There was a combination of piscatorial pride and mercantile

enterprise in this quaint device, that took our fancy. It

suggested also a curious question of psychology in regard to the

inhibitory influence of horses and fish upon the human nerve of

veracity. We named the place "Point Ananias."

And yet, in fact, it was a wild and lonely spot, and not even the

Hebrew inscription could spoil the sense of solitude that

surrounded us when the night came, and the storm howled across the

take, and the darkness encircled us with a wall that only seemed

the more dense and impenetrable as the firelight blazed and leaped

within the black ring.

"How far away is the nearest house, Johnny?"

"I don't know; fifty miles, I suppose."

"And what would you do if the canoes were burned, or if a tree fell

and smashed them?"

"Well, I'd say a Pater noster, and take bread and bacon enough for

four days, and an axe, and plenty of matches, and make a straight

line through the woods. But it wouldn't be a joke, M'sieu', I can

tell you."

The river Peribonca, into which Lake Tchitagama flows without a

break, is the noblest of all the streams that empty into Lake St.

John. It is said to be more than three hundred miles long, and at

the mouth of the lake it is perhaps a thousand feet wide, flowing

with a deep, still current through the forest. The dead-water

lasted for several miles; then the river sloped into a rapid,

spread through a net of islands, and broke over a ledge in a

cataract. Another quiet stretch was followed by another fall, and

so on, along the whole course of the river.

We passed three of these falls in the first day's voyage (by

portages so steep and rough that an Adirondack guide would have

turned gray at the sight of them), and camped at night just below

the Chute du Diable, where we found some ouananiche in the foam.

Our tents were on an islet, and all around we saw the primeval,

savage beauty of a world unmarred by man,

The river leaped, shouting, down its double stairway of granite,

rejoicing like a strong man to run a race. The after-glow in the

western sky deepened from saffron to violet among the tops of the

cedars, and over the cliffs rose the moonlight, paling the heavens

but glorifying the earth. There was something large and generous

and untrammelled in the scene, recalling one of Walt Whitman's

rhapsodies:--

"Earth of departed sunsets! Earth of the mountains misty-topped!

Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!

Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!"

All the next day we went down with the current. Regiments of black

spruce stood in endless files like grenadiers, each tree capped

with a thick tuft of matted cones and branches. Tall white birches

leaned out over the stream, Narcissus-like, as if to see their own

beauty in the moving mirror. There were touches of colour on the

banks, the ragged pink flowers of the Joe-Pye-weed (which always

reminds me of a happy, good-natured tramp), and the yellow ear-

drops of the jewel-weed, and the intense blue of the closed

gentian, that strange flower which, like a reticent heart, never

opens to the light. Sometimes the river spread out like a lake,

between high bluffs of sand fully a mile apart; and again it

divided into many channels, winding cunningly down among the

islands as if it were resolved to slip around the next barrier of

rock without a fall. There were eight of these huge natural dams

in the course of that day's journey. Sometimes we followed one of

the side canals, and made the portage at a distance from the main

cataract; and sometimes we ran with the central current to the very

brink of the chute, darting aside just in time to escape going

over. At the foot of the last fall we made our camp on a curving

beach of sand, and spent the rest of the afternoon in fishing.

It was interesting to see how closely the guides could guess at the

weight of the fish by looking at them. The ouananiche are much

longer in proportion to their weight than trout, and a novice

almost always overestimates them. But the guides were not

deceived. "This one will weigh four pounds and three-quarters, and

this one four pounds, but that one not more than three pounds; he

is meagre, M'sieu', BUT he is meagre." When we went ashore and

tried the spring balance (which every angler ought to carry with

him, as an aid to his conscience), the guides guess usually proved

to be within an ounce or two of the fact. Any one of the senses

can be educated to do the work of the others. The eyes of these

experienced fishermen were as sensitive to weight as if they had

been made to use as scales.

Below the last fall the Peribonca flows for a score of miles with

an unbroken, ever-widening stream, through low shores of forest and

bush and meadow. Near its mouth the Little Peribonca joins it, and

the immense flood, nearly two miles wide, pours into Lake St. John.

Here we saw the first outpost of civilisation--a huge unpainted

storehouse, where supplies are kept for the lumbermen and the new

settlers. Here also we found the tiny, lame steam launch that was

to carry us back to the Hotel Roberval. Our canoes were stowed

upon the roof of the cabin, and we embarked for the last stage of

our long journey.

As we came out of the river-mouth, the opposite shore of the lake

was invisible, and a stiff "Nor'wester" was rolling big waves

across the bar. It was like putting out into the open sea. The

launch laboured and puffed along for four or five miles, growing

more and more asthmatic with every breath. Then there was an

explosion in the engine-room. Some necessary part of the

intestinal machinery had blown out. There was a moment of

confusion. The captain hurried to drop the anchor, and the narrow

craft lay rolling in the billows.

What to do? The captain shrugged his shoulders like a Frenchman.

"Wait here, I suppose." But how long? "Who knows? Perhaps till

to-morrow; perhaps the day after. They will send another boat to

look for us in the course of time."

But the quarters were cramped; the weather looked ugly; if the wind

should rise, the cranky launch would not be a safe cradle for the

night. Damon and I preferred the canoes, for they at least would

float if they were capsized. So we stepped into the frail, buoyant

shells of bark once more, and danced over the big waves toward the

shore. We made a camp on a wind-swept point of sand, and felt like

shipwrecked mariners. But it was a gilt-edged shipwreck. For our

larder was still full, and as if to provide us with the luxuries as

well as the necessities of life, Nature had spread an inexhaustible

dessert of the largest and most luscious blueberries around our

tents.

After supper, strolling along the beach, we debated the best way of

escape; whether to send one of our canoes around the eastern shore

of the lake that night, to meet the steamer at the Island House and

bring it to our rescue; or to set out the next morning, and paddle

both canoes around the western end of the lake, thirty miles, to

the Hotel Roberval. While we were talking, we came to a dry old

birch-tree, with ragged, curling bark. "Here is a torch," cried

Damon, "to throw light upon the situation." He touched a match to

it, and the flames flashed up the tall trunk until it was

transformed into a pillar of fire. But the sudden illumination

burned out, and our counsels were wrapt again in darkness and

uncertainty, when there came a great uproar of steam-whistles from

the lake. They must be signalling for us. What could it mean?

We fired our guns, leaped into a canoe, leaving two of the guides

to break camp, and paddled out swiftly into the night. It seemed

an endless distance before we found the feeble light where the

crippled launch was tossing at anchor. The captain shouted

something about a larger steamboat and a raft of logs, out in the

lake, a mile or two beyond. Presently we saw the lights, and the

orange glow of the cabin windows. Was she coming, or going, or

standing still? We paddled on as fast as we could, shouting and

firing off a revolver until we had no more cartridges. We were

resolved not to let that mysterious vessel escape us, and threw

ourselves with energy into the novel excitement of chasing a

steamboat in the dark.

Then the lights began to swing around; the throbbing of paddle-

wheels grew louder and louder; she was evidently coming straight

toward us. At that moment it flashed upon us that, while she had

plenty of lights, we had none! We were lying, invisible, right

across her track. The character of the steamboat chase was

reversed. We turned and fled, as the guides say, a quatre pattes,

into illimitable space, trying to get out of the way of our too

powerful friend. It makes considerable difference, in the voyage

of life, whether you chase the steamboat, or the steamboat chases

you.

Meantime our other canoe had approached unseen. The steamer passed

safely between the two boats, slackening speed as the pilot caught

our loud halloo! She loomed up above us like a man-of-war, and as

we climbed the ladder to the main-deck we felt that we had indeed

gotten out of the wilderness. My old friend, Captain Savard, made

us welcome. He had been sent out, much to his disgust, to catch a

runaway boom of logs and tow it back to Roberval; it would be an

all night affair; but we must take possession of his stateroom and

make ourselves comfortable; he would certainly bring us to the

hotel in time for breakfast. So he went off on the upper deck, and

we heard him stamping about and yelling to his crew as they

struggled to get their unwieldy drove of six thousand logs in

motion.

All night long we assisted at the lumbermen's difficult enterprise.

We heard the steamer snorting and straining at her clumsy, stubborn

convoy. The hoarse shouts of the crew, disguised in a mongrel

dialect which made them (perhaps fortunately) less intelligible and

more forcible, mingled with our broken dreams.

But it was, in fact, a fitting close of our voyage. For what were

we doing? It was the last stage of the woodman's labour. It was

the gathering of a wild herd of the houses and churches and ships

and bridges that grow in the forests, and bringing them into the

fold of human service. I wonder how often the inhabitant of the

snug Queen Anne cottage in the suburbs remembers the picturesque

toil and varied hardship that it has cost to hew and drag his walls

and floors and pretty peaked roofs out of the backwoods. It might

enlarge his home, and make his musings by the winter fireside less

commonplace, to give a kindly thought now and then to the long

chain of human workers through whose hands the timber of his house

has passed, since it first felt the stroke of the axe in the snow-

bound winter woods, and floated, through the spring and summer, on

far-off lakes and little rivers, au large.

TROUT-FISHING IN THE TRAUN

"Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent

themselves for a time from the ties and objects that recall them;

but we can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that

gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend

the whole of my life in travelling abroad if I could anywhere

borrow another life to spend afterwards at home."--WILLIAM HAZLITT:

On Going a Journey.

The peculiarity of trout-fishing in the Traun is that one catches

principally grayling. But in this it resembles some other pursuits

which are not without their charm for minds open to the pleasures

of the unexpected--for example, reading George Borrow's The Bible

in Spain with a view to theological information, or going to the

opening night at the Academy of Design with the intention of

looking at pictures.

Moreover, there are really trout in the Traun, rari nantes in

gurgite; and in some places more than in others; and all of high

spirit, though few of great size. Thus the angler has his

favourite problem: Given an unknown stream and two kinds of fish,

the one better than the other; to find the better kind, and

determine the hour at which they will rise. This is sport.

As for the little river itself, it has so many beauties that one

does not think of asking whether it has any faults. Constant

fulness, and crystal clearness, and refreshing coolness of living

water, pale green like the jewel that is called aqua marina,

flowing over beds of clean sand and bars of polished gravel, and

dropping in momentary foam from rocky ledges, between banks that

are shaded by groves of fir and ash and poplar, or through dense

thickets of alder and willow, or across meadows of smooth verdure

sloping up to quaint old-world villages--all these are features of

the ideal little river.

I have spoken of these personal qualities first, because a truly

moral writer ought to make more of character than of position. A

good river in a bad country would be more worthy of affection than

a bad river in a good country. But the Traun has also the

advantages of an excellent worldly position. For it rises all over

the Salzkammergut, the summer hunting-ground of the Austrian

Emperor, and flows through that most picturesque corner of his

domain from end to end. Under the desolate cliffs of the

Todtengebirge on the east, and below the shining ice-fields of the

Dachstein on the south, and from the green alps around St. Wolfgang

on the west, the translucent waters are gathered in little tarns,

and shot through roaring brooks, and spread into lakes of wondrous

beauty, and poured through growing streams, until at last they are

all united just below the summer villa of his Kaiserly and Kingly

Majesty, Francis Joseph, and flow away northward, through the rest

of his game-preserve, into the Traunsee. It is an imperial

playground, and such as I would consent to hunt the chamois in, if

an inscrutable Providence had made me a kingly kaiser, or even a

plain king or an unvarnished kaiser. But, failing this, I was

perfectly content to spend a few idle days in fishing for trout and

catching grayling, at such times and places as the law of the

Austrian Empire allowed.

For it must be remembered that every stream in these over-civilised

European countries belongs to somebody, by purchase or rent. And

all the fish in the stream are supposed to belong to the person who

owns or rents it. They do not know their master's voice, neither

will they follow when he calls. But they are theoretically his.

To this legal fiction the untutored American must conform. He must

learn to clothe his natural desires in the raiment of lawful

sanction, and take out some kind of a license before he follows his

impulse to fish.

It was in the town of Aussee, at the junction of the two highest

branches of the Traun, that this impulse came upon me, mildly

irresistible. The full bloom of mid-July gayety in that ancient

watering-place was dampened, but not extinguished, by two days of

persistent and surprising showers. I had exhausted the

possibilities of interest in the old Gothic church, and felt all

that a man should feel in deciphering the mural tombstones of the

families who were exiled for their faith in the days of the

Reformation. The throngs of merry Hebrews from Vienna and Buda-

Pesth, amazingly arrayed as mountaineers and milk-maids, walking up

and down the narrow streets under umbrellas, had Cleopatra's charm

of an infinite variety; but custom staled it. The woodland paths,

winding everywhere through the plantations of fir-trees and

provided with appropriate names on wooden labels, and benches for

rest and conversation at discreet intervals, were too moist for

even the nymphs to take delight in them. The only creatures that

suffered nothing by the rain were the two swift, limpid Trauns,

racing through the woods, like eager and unabashed lovers, to meet

in the middle of the village. They were as clear, as joyous, as

musical as if the sun were shining. The very sight of their

opalescent rapids and eddying pools was an invitation to that

gentle sport which is said to have the merit of growing better as

the weather grows worse.

I laid this fact before the landlord of the hotel of the Erzherzog

Johann, as poetically as I could, but he assured me that it was of

no consequence without an invitation from the gentleman to whom the

streams belonged; and he had gone away for a week. The landlord

was such a good-natured person, and such an excellent sleeper, that

it was impossible to believe that he could have even the smallest

inaccuracy upon his conscience. So I bade him farewell, and took

my way, four miles through the woods, to the lake from which one of

the streams flowed.

It was called the Grundlsee. As I do not know the origin of the

name, I cannot consistently make any moral or historical

reflections upon it. But if it has never become famous, it ought

to be, for the sake of a cozy and busy little Inn, perched on a

green hill beside the lake and overlooking the whole length of it,

from the groups of toy villas at the foot to the heaps of real

mountains at the head. This Inn kept a thin but happy landlord,

who provided me with a blue license to angle, for the

inconsiderable sum of fifteen cents a day. This conferred the

right of fishing not only in the Grundlsee, but also in the smaller

tarn of Toplitz, a mile above it, and in the swift stream which

unites them. It all coincided with my desire as if by magic. A

row of a couple of miles to the head of the lake, and a walk

through the forest, brought me to the smaller pond; and as the

afternoon sun was ploughing pale furrows through the showers, I

waded out on a point of reeds and cast the artful fly in the shadow

of the great cliffs of the Dead Mountains.

It was a fit scene for a lone fisherman. But four sociable

tourists promptly appeared to act as spectators and critics. Fly-

fishing usually strikes the German mind as an eccentricity which

calls for remonstrance. After one of the tourists had suggestively

narrated the tale of seven trout which he had caught in another

lake, WITH WORMS, on the previous Sunday, they went away for a row,

(with salutations in which politeness but thinly veiled their

pity,) and left me still whipping the water in vain. Nor was the

fortune of the day much better in the stream below. It was a long

and wet wade for three fish too small to keep. I came out on the

shore of the lake, where I had left the row-boat, with empty bag

and a feeling of damp discouragement.

There was still an hour or so of daylight, and a beautiful place to

fish where the stream poured swirling out into the lake. A rise,

and a large one, though rather slow, awakened my hopes. Another

rise, evidently made by a heavy fish, made me certain that virtue

was about to be rewarded. The third time the hook went home. I

felt the solid weight of the fish against the spring of the rod,

and that curious thrill which runs up the line and down the arm,

changing, somehow or other, into a pleasurable sensation of

excitement as it reaches the brain. But it was only for a moment;

and then came that foolish, feeble shaking of the line from side to

side which tells the angler that he has hooked a great, big,

leather-mouthed chub--a fish which Izaak Walton says "the French

esteem so mean as to call him Un Vilain." Was it for this that I

had come to the country of Francis Joseph?

I took off the flies and put on one of those phantom minnows which

have immortalised the name of a certain Mr. Brown. The minnow

swung on a long line as the boat passed back and forth across the

current, once, twice, three times-- and on the fourth circle there

was a sharp strike. The rod bent almost double, and the reel sang

shrilly to the first rush of the fish. He ran; he doubled; he went

to the bottom and sulked; he tried to go under the boat; he did all

that a game fish can do, except leaping. After twenty minutes he

was tired enough to be lifted gently into the boat by a hand

slipped around his gills, and there he was, a lachsforelle of three

pounds' weight: small pointed head; silver sides mottled with dark

spots; square, powerful tail and large fins--a fish not unlike the

land-locked salmon of the Saguenay, but more delicate.

Half an hour later he was lying on the grass in front of the Inn.

The waiters paused, with their hands full of dishes, to look at

him; and the landlord called his guests, including my didactic

tourists, to observe the superiority of the trout of the Grundlsee.

The maids also came to look; and the buxom cook, with her spotless

apron and bare arms akimbo, was drawn from her kitchen, and pledged

her culinary honour that such a pracht-kerl should be served up in

her very best style. The angler who is insensible to this sort of

indirect flattery through his fish does not exist. Even the most

indifferent of men thinks more favourably of people who know a good

trout when they see it, and sits down to his supper with kindly

feelings. Possibly he reflects, also, upon the incident as a hint

of the usual size of the fish in that neighbourhood. He remembers

that he may have been favoured in this case beyond his deserts by

good-fortune, and resolving not to put too heavy a strain upon it,

considers the next place where it would be well for him to angle.

Hallstatt is about ten miles below Aussee. The Traun here expands

into a lake, very dark and deep, shut in by steep and lofty

mountains. The railway runs along the eastern shore. On the other

side, a mile away, you see the old town, its white houses clinging

to the cliff like lichens to the face of a rock. The guide-book

calls it "a highly original situation." But this is one of the

cases where a little less originality and a little more

reasonableness might be desired, at least by the permanent

inhabitants. A ledge under the shadow of a precipice makes a

trying winter residence. The people of Hallstatt are not a

blooming race: one sees many dwarfs and cripples among them. But

to the summer traveller the place seems wonderfully picturesque.

Most of the streets are flights of steps. The high-road has barely

room to edge itself through among the old houses, between the

window-gardens of bright flowers. On the hottest July day the

afternoon is cool and shady. The gay, little skiffs and long, open

gondolas are flitting continually along the lake, which is the main

street of Hallstatt.

The incongruous, but comfortable, modern hotel has a huge glass

veranda, where you can eat your dinner and observe human nature in

its transparent holiday disguises. I was much pleased and

entertained by a family, or confederacy, of people attired as

peasants--the men with feathered hats, green stockings, and bare

knees--the women with bright skirts, bodices, and silk

neckerchiefs--who were always in evidence, rowing gondolas with

clumsy oars, meeting the steamboat at the wharf several times a

day, and filling the miniature garden of the hotel with rustic

greetings and early Salzkammergut attitudes. After much

conjecture, I learned that they were the family and friends of a

newspaper editor from Vienna. They had the literary instinct for

local colour.

The fishing at Hallstatt is at Obertraun. There is a level stretch

of land above the lake, where the river flows peaceably, and the

fish have leisure to feed and grow. It is leased to a peasant, who

makes a business of supplying the hotels with fish. He was quite

willing to give permission to an angler; and I engaged one of his

sons, a capital young fellow, whose natural capacities for good

fellowship were only hampered by a most extraordinary German

dialect, to row me across the lake, and carry the net and a small

green barrel full of water to keep the fish alive, according to the

custom of the country. The first day we had only four trout large

enough to put into the barrel; the next day I think there were six;

the third day, I remember very well, there were ten. They were

pretty creatures, weighing from half a pound to a pound each, and

coloured as daintily as bits of French silk, in silver gray with

faint pink spots.

There was plenty to do at Hallstatt in the mornings. An hour's

walk from the town there was a fine waterfall, three hundred feet

high. On the side of the mountain above the lake was one of the

salt-mines for which the region is celebrated. It has been worked

for ages by many successive races, from the Celt downward. Perhaps

even the men of the Stone Age knew of it, and came hither for

seasoning to make the flesh of the cave-bear and the mammoth more

palatable. Modern pilgrims are permitted to explore the long, wet,

glittering galleries with a guide, and slide down the smooth wooden

rollers which join the different levels of the mines. This pastime

has the same fascination as sliding down the balusters; and it is

said that even queens and princesses have been delighted with it.

This is a touching proof of the fundamental simplicity and unity of

our human nature.

But by far the best excursion from Hallstatt was an all-day trip to

the Zwieselalp--a mountain which seems to have been especially

created as a point of view. From the bare summit you look right

into the face of the huge, snowy Dachstein, with the wild lake of

Gosau gleaming at its foot; and far away on the other side your

vision ranges over a confusion of mountains, with all the white

peaks of the Tyrol stretched along the horizon. Such a wide

outlook as this helps the fisherman to enjoy the narrow beauties of

his little rivers. No sport is at its best without interruption

and contrast. To appreciate wading, one ought to climb a little on

odd days.

Isehl is about ten or twelve miles below Hallstatt, in the valley

of the Traun. It is the fashionable summer-resort of Austria. I

found it in the high tide of amusement. The shady esplanade along

the river was crowded with brave women and fair men, in gorgeous

raiment; the hotels were overflowing; and there were various kinds

of music and entertainments at all hours of day and night. But all

this did not seem to affect the fishing.

The landlord of the Konigin Elizabeth, who is also the Burgomaster

and a gentleman of varied accomplishments and no leisure, kindly

furnished me with a fishing license in the shape of a large pink

card. There were many rules printed upon it: "All fishes under

nine inches must be gently restored to the water. No instrument of

capture must be used except the angle in the hand. The card of

legitimation must be produced and exhibited at the polite request

of any of the keepers of the river." Thus duly authorised and

instructed, I sallied forth to seek my pastime according to the

law.

The easiest way, in theory, was to take the afternoon train up the

river to one of the villages, and fish down a mile or two in the

evening, returning by the eight o'clock train. But in practice the

habits of the fish interfered seriously with the latter part of

this plan.

On my first day I had spent several hours in the vain effort to

catch something better than small grayling. The best time for the

trout was just approaching, as the broad light faded from the

stream; already they were beginning to feed, when I looked up from

the edge of a pool and saw the train rattling down the valley below

me. Under the circumstances the only thing to do was to go on

fishing. It was an even pool with steep banks, and the water ran

through it very straight and swift, some four feet deep and thirty

yards across. As the tail-fly reached the middle of the water, a

fine trout literally turned a somersault over it, but without

touching it. At the next cast he was ready, taking it with a rush

that carried him into the air with the fly in his mouth. He

weighed three-quarters of a pound. The next one was equally eager

in rising and sharp in playing, and the third might have been his

twin sister or brother. So, after casting for hours and taking

nothing in the most beautiful pools, I landed three trout from one

unlikely place in fifteen minutes. That was because the trout's

supper-time had arrived. So had mine. I walked over to the

rambling old inn at Goisern, sought the cook in the kitchen and

persuaded her, in spite of the lateness of the hour, to boil the

largest of the fish for my supper, after which I rode peacefully

back to Ischl by the eleven o'clock train.

For the future I resolved to give up the illusory idea of coming

home by rail, and ordered a little one-horse carriage to meet me at

some point on the high-road every evening at nine o'clock. In this

way I managed to cover the whole stream, taking a lower part each

day, from the lake of Hallstatt down to Ischl.

There was one part of the river, near Laufen, where the current was

very strong and waterfally, broken by ledges of rock. Below these

it rested in long, smooth reaches, much beloved by the grayling.

There was no difficulty in getting two or three of them out of each

run.

The grayling has a quaint beauty. His appearance is aesthetic,

like a fish in a pre-raphaelite picture. His colour, in midsummer,

is a golden gray, darker on the back, and with a few black spots

just behind his gills, like patches put on to bring out the pallor

of his complexion. He smells of wild thyme when he first comes out

of the water, wherefore St. Ambrose of Milan complimented him in

courtly fashion "Quid specie tua gratius? Quid odore fragrantius?

Quod mella fragrant, hoc tuo corpore spiras." But the chief glory

of the grayling is the large iridescent fin on his back. You see

it cutting the water as he swims near the surface; and when you

have him on the bank it arches over him like a rainbow. His mouth

is under his chin, and he takes the fly gently, by suction. He is,

in fact, and to speak plainly, something of a sucker; but then he

is a sucker idealised and refined, the flower of the family.

Charles Cotton, the ingenious young friend of Walton, was all wrong

in calling the grayling "one of the deadest-hearted fishes in the

world." He fights and leaps and whirls, and brings his big fin to

bear across the force of the current with a variety of tactics that

would put his more aristocratic fellow-citizen, the trout, to the

blush. Twelve of these pretty fellows, with a brace of good trout

for the top, filled my big creel to the brim. And yet, such is the

inborn hypocrisy of the human heart that I always pretended to

myself to be disappointed because there were not more trout, and

made light of the grayling as a thing of naught.

The pink fishing license did not seem to be of much use. Its

exhibition was demanded only twice. Once a river guardian, who was

walking down the stream with a Belgian Baron and encouraging him to

continue fishing, climbed out to me on the end of a long

embankment, and with proper apologies begged to be favoured with a

view of my document. It turned out that his request was a favour

to me, for it discovered the fact that I had left my fly-book, with

the pink card in it, beside an old mill, a quarter of a mile up the

stream.

Another time I was sitting beside the road, trying to get out of a

very long, wet, awkward pair of wading-stockings, an occupation

which is unfavourable to tranquillity of mind, when a man came up

to me in the dusk and accosted me with an absence of politeness

which in German amounted to an insult.

"Have you been fishing?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"Have you any right to fish?"

"What right have you to ask?"

"I am a keeper of the river. Where is your card?"

"It is in my pocket. But pardon my curiosity, where is YOUR card?"

This question appeared to paralyse him. He had probably never been

asked for his card before. He went lumbering off in the darkness,

muttering "My card? Unheard of! MY card!"

The routine of angling at Ischl was varied by an excursion to the

Lake of St. Wolfgang and the Schafberg, an isolated mountain on

whose rocky horn an inn has been built. It stands up almost like a

bird-house on a pole, and commands a superb prospect; northward,

across the rolling plain and the Bavarian forest; southward, over a

tumultuous land of peaks and precipices. There are many lovely

lakes in sight; but the loveliest of all is that which takes its

name from the old saint who wandered hither from the country of the

"furious Franks" and built his peaceful hermitage on the

Falkenstein. What good taste some of those old saints had!

There is a venerable church in the village, with pictures

attributed to Michael Wohlgemuth, and a chapel which is said to

mark the spot where St. Wolfgang, who had lost his axe far up the

mountain, found it, like Longfellow's arrow, in an oak, and "still

unbroke." The tree is gone, so it was impossible to verify the

story. But the saint's well is there, in a pavilion, with a bronze

image over it, and a profitable inscription to the effect that the

poorer pilgrims, "who have come unprovided with either money or

wine, should be jolly well contented to find the water so fine."

There is also a famous echo farther up the lake, which repeats six

syllables with accuracy. It is a strange coincidence that there

are just six syllables in the name of "der heilige Wolfgang." But

when you translate it into English, the inspiration of the echo

seems to be less exact. The sweetest thing about St. Wolfgang was

the abundance of purple cyclamens, clothing the mountain meadows,

and filling the air with delicate fragrance like the smell of

lilacs around a New England farmhouse in early June.

There was still one stretch of the river above Ischl left for the

last evening's sport. I remember it so well: the long, deep place

where the water ran beside an embankment of stone, and the big

grayling poised on the edge of the shadow, rising and falling on

the current as a kite rises and falls on the wind and balances back

to the same position; the murmur of the stream and the hissing of

the pebbles underfoot in the rapids as the swift water rolled them

over and over; the odour of the fir-trees, and the streaks of warm

air in quiet places, and the faint whiffs of wood-smoke wafted from

the houses, and the brown flies dancing heavily up and down in the

twilight; the last good pool, where the river was divided, the main

part making a deep, narrow curve to the right, and the lesser part

bubbling into it over a bed of stones with half-a-dozen tiny

waterfalls, with a fine trout lying at the foot of each of them and

rising merrily as the white fly passed over him--surely it was all

very good, and a memory to be grateful for. And when the basket

was full, it was pleasant to put off the heavy wading-shoes and the

long rubber-stockings, and ride homeward in an open carriage

through the fresh night air. That is as near to sybaritic luxury

as a man should care to come.

The lights in the cottages are twinkling like fire-flies, and there

are small groups of people singing and laughing down the road. The

honest fisherman reflects that this world is only a place of

pilgrimage, but after all there is a good deal of cheer on the

journey, if it is made with a contented heart. He wonders who the

dwellers in the scattered houses may be, and weaves romances out of

the shadows on the curtained windows. The lamps burning in the

wayside shrines tell him stories of human love and patience and

hope, and of divine forgiveness. Dream-pictures of life float

before him, tender and luminous, filled with a vague, soft

atmosphere in which the simplest outlines gain a strange

significance. They are like some of Millet's paintings--"The

Sower," or "The Sheepfold,"--there is very little detail in them

but sometimes a little means so much.

Then the moon slips up into the sky from behind the hills, and the

fisherman begins to think of home, and of the foolish, fond old

rhymes about those whom the moon sees far away, and the stars that

have the power to fulfil wishes--as if the celestial bodies knew or

cared anything about our small nerve-thrills which we call

affection and desires! But if there were Some One above the moon

and stars who did know and care, Some One who could see the places

and the people that you and I would give so much to see, Some One

who could do for them all of kindness that you and I fain would do,

Some One able to keep our beloved in perfect peace and watch over

the little children sleeping in their beds beyond the sea--what

then? Why, then, in the evening hour, one might have thoughts of

home that would go across the ocean by way of heaven, and be better

than dreams, almost as good as prayers.

AT THE SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH

"Come live with me, and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove

That valleys, groves, or hills, or field,

Or woods and steepy mountains yield.

"There we will rest our sleepy heads,

And happy hearts, on balsam beds;

And every day go forth to fish

In foamy streams for ouananiche."

Old Song with a new Ending.

It has been asserted, on high philosophical authority, that woman

is a problem. She is more; she is a cause of problems to others.

This is not a theoretical statement. It is a fact of experience.

Every year, when the sun passes the summer solstice, the

"Two souls with but a single thought,"

of whom I am so fortunate as to be one, are summoned by that

portion of our united mind which has at once the right of putting

the question and of casting the deciding vote, to answer this

conundrum: How can we go abroad without crossing the ocean, and

abandon an interesting family of children without getting

completely beyond their reach, and escape from the frying-pan of

housekeeping without falling into the fire of the summer hotel?

This apparently insoluble problem we usually solve by going to camp

in Canada.

It is indeed a foreign air that breathes around us as we make the

harmless, friendly voyage from Point Levis to Quebec. The boy on

the ferry-boat, who cajoles us into buying a copy of Le Moniteur

containing last month's news, has the address of a true though

diminutive Frenchman. The landlord of the quiet little inn on the

outskirts of the town welcomes us with Gallic effusion as well-

known guests, and rubs his hands genially before us, while he

escorts us to our apartments, groping secretly in his memory to

recall our names. When we walk down the steep, quaint streets to

revel in the purchase of moccasins and water-proof coats and

camping supplies, we read on a wall the familiar but transformed

legend, L'enfant pleurs, il veut son Camphoria, and remember with

joy that no infant who weeps in French can impose any

responsibility upon us in these days of our renewed honeymoon.

But the true delight of the expedition begins when the tents have

been set up, in the forest back of Lake St. John, and the green

branches have been broken for the woodland bed, and the fire has

been lit under the open sky, and, the livery of fashion being all

discarded, I sit down at a log table to eat supper with my lady

Greygown. Then life seems simple and amiable and well worth

living. Then the uproar and confusion of the world die away from

us, and we hear only the steady murmur of the river and the low

voice of the wind in the tree-tops. Then time is long, and the

only art that is needful for its enjoyment is short and easy. Then

we taste true comfort, while we lodge with Mother Green at the Sign

of the Balsam Bough.

I.

UNDER THE WHITE BIRCHES.

Men may say what they will in praise of their houses, and grow

eloquent upon the merits of various styles of architecture, but,

for our part, we are agreed that there is nothing to be compared

with a tent. It is the most venerable and aristocratic form of

human habitation. Abraham and Sarah lived in it, and shared its

hospitality with angels. It is exempt from the base tyranny of the

plumber, the paper-hanger, and the gas-man. It is not immovably

bound to one dull spot of earth by the chains of a cellar and a

system of water-pipes. It has a noble freedom of locomotion. It

follows the wishes of its inhabitants, and goes with them, a

travelling home, as the spirit moves them to explore the

wilderness. At their pleasure, new beds of wild flowers surround

it, new plantations of trees overshadow it, and new avenues of

shining water lead to its ever-open door. What the tent lacks in

luxury it makes up in liberty: or rather let us say that liberty

itself is the greatest luxury.

Another thing is worth remembering--a family which lives in a tent

never can have a skeleton in the closet.

But it must not be supposed that every spot in the woods is

suitable for a camp, or that a good tenting-ground can be chosen

without knowledge and forethought. One of the requisites, indeed,

is to be found everywhere in the St. John region; for all the lakes

and rivers are full of clear, cool water, and the traveller does

not need to search for a spring. But it is always necessary to

look carefully for a bit of smooth ground on the shore, far enough

above the water to be dry, and slightly sloping, so that the head

of the bed may be higher than the foot. Above all, it must be free

from big stones and serpentine roots of trees. A root that looks

no bigger that an inch-worm in the daytime assumes the proportions

of a boa-constrictor at midnight--when you find it under your hip-

bone. There should also be plenty of evergreens near at hand for

the beds. Spruce will answer at a pinch; it has an aromatic smell;

but it is too stiff and humpy. Hemlock is smoother and more

flexible; but the spring soon wears out of it. The balsam-fir,

with its elastic branches and thick flat needles, is the best of

all. A bed of these boughs a foot deep is softer than a mattress

and as fragrant as a thousand Christmas-trees. Two things more are

needed for the ideal camp-ground--an open situation, where the

breeze will drive away the flies and mosquitoes, and an abundance

of dry firewood within easy reach. Yes, and a third thing must not

be forgotten; for, says my lady Greygown:

"I shouldn't feel at home in camp unless I could sit in the door of

the tent and look out across flowing water."

All these conditions are met in our favourite camping place below

the first fall in the Grande Decharge. A rocky point juts out into

the rivet and makes a fine landing for the canoes. There is a

dismantled fishing-cabin a few rods back in the woods, from which

we can borrow boards for a table and chairs. A group of cedars on

the lower edge of the point opens just wide enough to receive and

shelter our tent. At a good distance beyond ours, the guides' tent

is pitched; and the big camp-fire burns between the two dwellings.

A pair of white-birches lift their leafy crowns far above us, and

after them we name the place Le Camp aux Bouleaux.

"Why not call trees people?--since, if you come to live among them

year after year, you will learn to know many of them personally,

and an attachment will grow up between you and them individually."

So writes that Doctor Amabilis of woodcraft, W. C. Prime, in his

book, Among the Northern Hills, and straightway launches forth into

eulogy on the white-birch. And truly it is an admirable, lovable,

and comfortable tree, beautiful to look upon and full of various

uses. Its wood is strong to make paddles and axe handles, and

glorious to burn, blazing up at first with a flashing flame, and

then holding the fire in its glowing heart all through the night.

Its bark is the most serviceable of all the products of the

wilderness. In Russia, they say, it is used in tanning, and gives

its subtle, sacerdotal fragrance to Russia leather. But here, in

the woods, it serves more primitive ends. It can be peeled off in

a huge roll from some giant tree and fashioned into a swift canoe

to carry man over the waters. It can be cut into square sheets to

roof his shanty in the forest. It is the paper on which he writes

his woodland despatches, and the flexible material which he bends

into drinking-cups of silver lined with gold. A thin strip of it

wrapped around the end of a candle and fastened in a cleft stick

makes a practicable chandelier. A basket for berries, a horn to

call the lovelorn moose through the autumnal woods, a canvas on

which to draw the outline of great and memorable fish--all these

and many other indispensable luxuries are stored up for the skilful

woodsman in the birch bark.

Only do not rob or mar the tree, unless you really need what it has

to give you. Let it stand and grow in virgin majesty, ungirdled

and unscarred, while the trunk becomes a firm pillar of the forest

temple, and the branches spread abroad a refuge of bright green

leaves for the birds of the air. Nature never made a more

excellent piece of handiwork. "And if," said my lady Greygown, "I

should ever become a dryad, I would choose to be transformed into a

white-birch. And then, when the days of my life were numbered, and

the sap had ceased to flow, and the last leaf had fallen, and the

dry bark hung around me in ragged curls and streamers, some

wandering hunter would come in the wintry night and touch a lighted

coal to my body, and my spirit would flash up in a fiery chariot

into the sky."

The chief occupation of our idle days on the Grande Decharge was

fishing. Above the camp spread a noble pool, more than two miles

in circumference, and diversified with smooth bays and whirling

eddies, sand beaches and rocky islands. The river poured into it

at the head, foaming and raging down a long chute, and swept out of

it just in front of our camp in a merry, musical rapid. It was

full of fish of various kinds--long-nosed pickerel, wall-eyed pike,

and stupid chub. But the prince of the pool was the fighting

ouananiche, the little salmon of St. John.

Here let me chant thy praise, thou noblest and most high-minded

fish, the cleanest feeder, the merriest liver, the loftiest leaper,

and the bravest warrior of all creatures that swim! Thy cousin,

the trout, in his purple and gold with crimson spots, wears a more

splendid armour than thy russet and silver mottled with black, but

thine is the kinglier nature. His courage and skill compared with

thine

"Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine."

The old salmon of the sea who begot thee, long ago, in these inland

waters, became a backslider, descending again to the ocean, and

grew gross and heavy with coarse feeding. But thou, unsalted

salmon of the foaming floods, not landlocked, as men call thee, but

choosing of thine own free-will to dwell on a loftier level, in the

pure, swift current of a living stream, hast grown in grace and

risen to a higher life. Thou art not to be measured by quantity,

but by quality, and thy five pounds of pure vigour will outweigh a

score of pounds of flesh less vitalised by spirit. Thou feedest on

the flies of the air, and thy food is transformed into an aerial

passion for flight, as thou springest across the pool, vaulting

toward the sky. Thine eyes have grown large and keen by peering

through the foam, and the feathered hook that can deceive thee must

be deftly tied and delicately cast. Thy tail and fins, by

ceaseless conflict with the rapids, have broadened and

strengthened, so that they can flash thy slender body like a living

arrow up the fall. As Lancelot among the knights, so art thou

among the fish, the plain-armoured hero, the sunburnt champion of

all the water-folk.

Every morning and evening, Greygown and I would go out for

ouananiche, and sometimes we caught plenty and sometimes few, but

we never came back without a good catch of happiness. There were

certain places where the fish liked to stay. For example, we

always looked for one at the lower corner of a big rock, very close

to it, where he could poise himself easily on the edge of the

strong downward stream. Another likely place was a straight run of

water, swift, but not too swift, with a sunken stone in the middle.

The ouananiche does not like crooked, twisting water. An even

current is far more comfortable, for then he discovers just how

much effort is needed to balance against it, and keeps up the

movement mechanically, as if he were half asleep. But his

favourite place is under one of the floating islands of thick foam

that gather in the corners below the falls. The matted flakes give

a grateful shelter from the sun, I fancy, and almost all game-fish

love to lie in the shade; but the chief reason why the onananiche

haunt the drifting white mass is because it is full of flies and

gnats, beaten down by the spray of the cataract, and sprinkled all

through the foam like plums in a cake. To this natural confection

the little salmon, lurking in his corner, plays the part of Jack

Horner all day long, and never wearies.

"See that belle brou down below there!" said Ferdinand, as we

scrambled over the huge rocks at the foot of the falls; "there

ought to be salmon there en masse." Yes, there were the sharp

noses picking out the unfortunate insects, and the broad tails

waving lazily through the foam as the fish turned in the water. At

this season of the year, when summer is nearly ended, and every

ouananiche in the Grande Decharge has tasted feathers and seen a

hook, it is useless to attempt to delude them with the large gaudy

flies which the fishing-tackle-maker recommends. There are only

two successful methods of angling now. The first of these I tried,

and by casting delicately with a tiny brown trout-fly tied on a

gossamer strand of gut, captured a pair of fish weighing about

three pounds each. They fought against the spring of the four-

ounce rod for nearly half an hour before Ferdinand could slip the

net around them. But there was another and a broader tail still

waving disdainfully on the outer edge of the foam. "And now," said

the gallant Ferdinand, "the turn is to madame, that she should

prove her fortune--attend but a moment, madame, while I seek the

sauterelle."

This was the second method: the grasshopper was attached to the

hook, and casting the line well out across the pool, Ferdinand put

the rod into Greygown's hands. She stood poised upon a pinnacle of

rock, like patience on a monument, waiting for a bite. It came.

There was a slow, gentle pull at the line, answered by a quick jerk

of the rod, and a noble fish flashed into the air. Four pounds and

a half at least! He leaped again and again, shaking the drops from

his silvery sides. He rushed up the rapids as if he had determined

to return to the lake, and down again as if he had changed his

plans and determined to go to the Saguenay. He sulked in the deep

water and rubbed his nose against the rocks. He did his best to

treat that treacherous grasshopper as the whale served Jonah. But

Greygown, through all her little screams and shouts of excitement,

was steady and sage. She never gave the fish an inch of slack

line; and at last he lay glittering on the rocks, with the black

St. Andrew's crosses clearly marked on his plump sides, and the

iridescent spots gleaming on his small, shapely head. "Une belle!"

cried Ferdinand, as he held up the fish in triumph, "and it is

madame who has the good fortune. She understands well to take the

large fish--is it not?" Greygown stepped demurely down from her

pinnacle, and as we drifted down the pool in the canoe, under the

mellow evening sky, her conversation betrayed not a trace of the

pride that a victorious fisherman would have shown. On the

contrary, she insisted that angling was an affair of chance--which

was consoling, though I knew it was not altogether true--and that

the smaller fish were just as pleasant to catch and better to eat,

after all. For a generous rival, commend me to a woman. And if I

must compete, let it be with one who has the grace to dissolve the

bitter of defeat in the honey of a mutual self-congratulation.

We had a garden, and our favourite path through it was the portage

leading around the falls. We travelled it very frequently, making

an excuse of idle errands to the steamboat-landing on the lake, and

sauntering along the trail as if school were out and would never

keep again. It was the season of fruits rather than of flowers.

Nature was reducing the decorations of her table to make room for

the banquet. She offered us berries instead of blossoms.

There were the light coral clusters of the dwarf cornel set in

whorls of pointed leaves; and the deep blue bells of the Clintonia

borealis (which the White Mountain people call the bear-berry, and

I hope the name will stick, for it smacks of the woods, and it is a

shame to leave so free and wild a plant under the burden of a Latin

name); and the gray, crimson-veined berries for which the Canada

Mayflower had exchanged its feathery white bloom; and the ruby

drops of the twisted stalk hanging like jewels along its bending

stem. On the three-leaved table which once carried the gay flower

of the wake-robin, there was a scarlet lump like a red pepper

escaped to the forest and run wild. The partridge-vine was full of

rosy provision for the birds. The dark tiny leaves of the creeping

snow-berry were all sprinkled over with delicate drops of spicy

foam. There were few belated raspberries, and, if we chose to go

out into the burnt ground, we could find blueberries in plenty.

But there was still bloom enough to give that festal air without

which the most abundant feast seems coarse and vulgar. The pale

gold of the loosestrife had faded, but the deeper yellow of the

goldenrod had begun to take its place. The blue banners of the

fleur-de-lis had vanished from beside the springs, but the purple

of the asters was appearing. Closed gentians kept their secret

inviolate, and bluebells trembled above the rocks. The quaint

pinkish-white flowers of the turtle-head showed in wet places, and

instead of the lilac racemes of the purple-fringed orchis, which

had disappeared with midsummer, we found now the slender braided

spikes of the lady's-tresses, latest and lowliest of the orchids,

pale and pure as nuns of the forest, and exhaling a celestial

fragrance. There is a secret pleasure in finding these delicate

flowers in the rough heart of the wilderness. It is like

discovering the veins of poetry in the character of a guide or a

lumberman. And to be able to call the plants by name makes them a

hundredfold more sweet and intimate. Naming things is one of the

oldest and simplest of human pastimes. Children play at it with

their dolls and toy animals. In fact, it was the first game ever

played on earth, for the Creator who planted the garden eastward in

Eden knew well what would please the childish heart of man, when He

brought all the new-made creatures to Adam, "to see what he would

call them."

Our rustic bouquet graced the table under the white-birches, while

we sat by the fire and watched our four men at the work of the

camp--Joseph and Raoul chopping wood in the distance; Francois

slicing juicy rashers from the flitch of bacon; and Ferdinand, the

chef, heating the frying-pan in preparation for supper.

"Have you ever thought," said Greygown, in a contented tone of

voice, "that this is the only period of our existence when we

attain to the luxury of a French cook?"

"And one with the grand manner, too," I replied, "for he never

fails to ask what it is that madame desires to eat to-day, as if

the larder of Lucullus were at his disposal, though he knows well

enough that the only choice lies between broiled fish and fried

fish, or bacon with eggs and a rice omelet. But I like the fiction

of a lordly ordering of the repast. How much better it is than

having to eat what is flung before you at a summer boarding-house

by a scornful waitress!"

"Another thing that pleases me," continued my lady, "is the

unbreakableness of the dishes. There are no nicks in the edges of

the best plates here; and, oh! it is a happy thing to have a home

without bric-a-brac. There is nothing here that needs to be

dusted."

"And no engagements for to-morrow," I ejaculated. "Dishes that

can't be broken, and plans that can--that's the ideal of

housekeeping."

"And then," added my philosopher in skirts, "it is certainly

refreshing to get away from all one's relations for a little

while."

"But how do you make that out?" I asked, in mild surprise. "What

are you going to do with me?"

"Oh," said she, with a fine air of independence, "I don't count

you. You are not a relation, only a connection by marriage."

"Well, my dear," I answered, between the meditative puffs of my

pipe, "it is good to consider the advantages of our present

situation. We shall soon come into the frame of mind of the Sultan

of Morocco when he camped in the Vale of Rabat. The place pleased

him so well that he staid until the very pegs of his tent took root

and grew up into a grove of trees around his pavilion."

II.

KENOGAMI.

The guides were a little restless under the idle regime of our lazy

camp, and urged us to set out upon some adventure. Ferdinand was

like the uncouth swain in Lycidas. Sitting upon the bundles of

camp equipage on the shore, and crying,--

"To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new,"

he led us forth to seek the famous fishing grounds on Lake

Kenogami.

We skirted the eastern end of Lake St. John in our two canoes, and

pushed up La Belle Riviere to Hebertville, where all the children

turned out to follow our procession through the village. It was

like the train that tagged after the Pied Piper of Hamelin. We

embarked again, surrounded by an admiring throng, at the bridge

where the main street crossed a little stream, and paddled up it,

through a score of back yards and a stretch of reedy meadows, where

the wild and tame ducks fed together, tempting the sportsman to

sins of ignorance. We crossed the placid Lac Vert, and after a

carry of a mile along the high-road toward Chicoutimi, turned down

a steep hill and pitched our tents on a crescent of silver sand,

with the long, fair water of Kenogami before us.

It is amazing to see how quickly these woodsmen can make a camp.

Each one knew precisely his share of the enterprise. One sprang to

chop a dry spruce log into fuel for a quick fire, and fell a harder

tree to keep us warm through the night. Another stripped a pile of

boughs from a balsam for the beds. Another cut the tent-poles from

a neighbouring thicket. Another unrolled the bundles and made

ready the cooking utensils. As if by magic, the miracle of the

camp was accomplished.--

"The bed was made, the room was fit,

 By punctual eve the stars were lit"--

but Greygown always insists upon completing that quotation from

Stevenson in her own voice; for this is the way it ends,--

"When we put up, my ass and I,

 At God's green caravanserai."

Our permanent camp was another day's voyage down the lake, on a

beach opposite the Point Ausable. There the water was contracted

to a narrow strait, and in the swift current, close to the point,

the great trout had fixed their spawning-bed from time immemorial.

It was the first week in September, and the magnates of the lake

were already assembling--the Common Councilmen and the Mayor and

the whole Committee of Seventy. There were giants in that place,

rolling lazily about, and chasing each other on the surface of the

water. "Look, M'sieu'!" cried Francois, in excitement, as we lay

at anchor in the gray morning twilight; "one like a horse has just

leaped behind us; I assure you, big like a horse!"

But the fish were shy and dour. Old Castonnier, the guardian of

the lake, lived in his hut on the shore, and flogged the water,

early and late, every day with his home-made flies. He was

anchored in his dugout close beside us, and grinned with delight as

he saw his over-educated trout refuse my best casts. "They are

here, M'sieu', for you can see them," he said, by way of

discouragement, "but it is difficult to take them. Do you not find

it so?"

In the back of my fly-book I discovered a tiny phantom minnow--a

dainty affair of varnished silk, as light as a feather--and quietly

attached it to the leader in place of the tail-fly. Then the fun

began.

One after another the big fish dashed at that deception, and we

played and netted them, until our score was thirteen, weighing

altogether thirty-five pounds, and the largest five pounds and a

half. The guardian was mystified and disgusted. He looked on for

a while in silence, and then pulled up anchor and clattered ashore.

He must have made some inquiries and reflections during the day,

for that night he paid a visit to our camp. After telling bear

stories and fish stories for an hour or two by the fire, he rose to

depart, and tapping his forefinger solemnly upon my shoulder,

delivered himself as follows:--

"You can say a proud thing when you go home, M'sieu'--that you have

beaten the old Castonnier. There are not many fishermen who can

say that. "But," he added, with confidential emphasis, "c'etait

votre sacre p'tit poisson qui a fait cela."

That was a touch of human nature, my rusty old guardian, more

welcome to me than all the morning's catch. Is there not always a

"confounded little minnow" responsible for our failures? Did you

ever see a school-boy tumble on the ice without stooping

immediately to re-buckle the strap of his skates? And would not

Ignotus have painted a masterpiece if he could have found good

brushes and a proper canvas? Life's shortcomings would be bitter

indeed if we could not find excuses for them outside of ourselves.

And as for life's successes--well, it is certainly wholesome to

remember how many of them are due to a fortunate position and the

proper tools.

Our tent was on the border of a coppice of young trees. It was

pleasant to be awakened by a convocation of birds at sunrise, and

to watch the shadows of the leaves dance out upon our translucent

roof of canvas.

All the birds in the bush are early, but there are so many of them

that it is difficult to believe that every one can be rewarded with

a worm. Here in Canada those little people of the air who appear

as transient guests of spring and autumn in the Middle States, are

in their summer home and breeding-place. Warblers, named for the

magnolia and the myrtle, chestnut-sided, bay-breasted, blue-backed,

and black-throated, flutter and creep along the branches with

simple lisping music. Kinglets, ruby-crowned and golden-crowned,

tiny, brilliant sparks of life, twitter among the trees, breaking

occasionally into clearer, sweeter songs. Companies of redpolls

and crossbills pass chirping through the thickets, busily seeking

their food. The fearless, familiar chickadee repeats his name

merrily, while he leads his family to explore every nook and cranny

of the wood. Cedar wax-wings, sociable wanderers, arrive in

numerous flocks. The Canadians call them "recollets," because they

wear a brown crest of the same colour as the hoods of the monks who

came with the first settlers to New France. They are a songless

tribe, although their quick, reiterated call as they take to flight

has given them the name of chatterers. The beautiful tree-sparrows

and the pine-siskins are more melodious, and the slate-coloured

juncos, flitting about the camp, are as garrulous as chippy-birds.

All these varied notes come and go through the tangle of morning

dreams. And now the noisy blue-jay is calling "Thief--thief--

thief!" in the distance, and a pair of great pileated woodpeckers

with crimson crests are laughing loudly in the swamp over some

family joke. But listen! what is that harsh creaking note? It is

the cry of the Northern shrike, of whom tradition says that he

catches little birds and impales them on sharp thorns. At the

sound of his voice the concert closes suddenly and the singers

vanish into thin air. The hour of music is over; the commonplace

of day has begun. And there is my lady Greygown, already up and

dressed, standing by the breakfast-table and laughing at my belated

appearance.

But the birds were not our only musicians at Kenogami. French

Canada is one of the ancestral homes of song. Here you can still

listen to those quaint ballads which were sung centuries ago in

Normandie and Provence. "A la Claire Fontaine," "Dans Paris y a-t-

une Brune plus Belle que le Jour," "Sur le Pont d'Avignon," "En

Roulant ma Boule," "La Poulette Grise," and a hundred other folk-

songs linger among the peasants and voyageurs of these northern

woods. You may hear

"Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre--

 Mironton, mironton, mirontaine,"

and

"Isabeau s'y promene

 Le long de son jardin,"

chanted in the farmhouse or the lumber shanty, to the tunes which

have come down from an unknown source, and never lost their echo in

the hearts of the people.

Our Ferdinand was a perfect fountain of music. He had a clear

tenor voice, and solaced every task and shortened every voyage with

melody. "A song, Ferdinand, a jolly song," the other men would

say, as the canoes went sweeping down the quiet lake. And then the

leader would strike up a well-known air, and his companions would

come in on the refrain, keeping time with the stroke of their

paddles. Sometimes it would be a merry ditty:

"My father had no girl but me,

 And yet he sent me off to sea;

 Leap, my little Cecilia."

Or perhaps it was:

"I've danced so much the livelong day,--

 Dance, my sweetheart, let's be gay,--

 I've fairly danced my shoes away,--

       Till evening.

 Dance, my pretty, dance once more;

 Dance, until we break the floor."

But more frequently the song was touched with a plaintive pleasant

melancholy. The minstrel told how he had gone into the woods and

heard the nightingale, and she had confided to him that lovers are

often unhappy. The story of La Belle Francoise was repeated in

minor cadences--how her sweetheart sailed away to the wars, and

when he came back the village church bells were ringing, and he

said to himself that Francoise had been faithless, and the chimes

were for her marriage; but when he entered the church it was her

funeral that he saw, for she had died of love. It is strange how

sorrow charms us when it is distant and visionary. Even when we

are happiest we enjoy making music

"Of old, unhappy, far-off things."

"What is that song which you are singing, Ferdinand?" asks the

lady, as she hears him humming behind her in the canoe.

"Ah, madame, it is the chanson of a young man who demands of his

blonde why she will not marry him. He says that he has waited long

time, and the flowers are falling from the rose-tree, and he is

very sad."

"And does she give a reason?"

"Yes, madame--that is to say, a reason of a certain sort; she

declares that she is not quite ready; he must wait until the rose-

tree adorns itself again."

"And what is the end--do they get married at last?"

"But I do not know, madame. The chanson does not go so far. It

ceases with the complaint of the young man. And it is a very

uncertain affair--this affair of the heart--is it not?"

Then, as if he turned from such perplexing mysteries to something

plain and sure and easy to understand, he breaks out into the

jolliest of all Canadian songs:

"My bark canoe that flies, that flies,

 Hola! my bark canoe!"

III.

THE ISLAND POOL.

Among the mountains there is a gorge. And in the gorge there is a

river. And in the river there is a pool. And in the pool there is

an island. And on the island, for four happy days, there was a

camp.

It was by no means an easy matter to establish ourselves in that

lonely place. The river, though not remote from civilisation, is

practically inaccessible for nine miles of its course by reason of

the steepness of its banks, which are long, shaggy precipices, and

the fury of its current, in which no boat can live. We heard its

voice as we approached through the forest, and could hardly tell

whether it was far away or near.

There is a perspective of sound as well as of sight, and one must

have some idea of the size of a noise before one can judge of its

distance. A mosquito's horn in a dark room may seem like a trumpet

on the battlements; and the tumult of a mighty stream heard through

an unknown stretch of woods may appear like the babble of a

mountain brook close at hand.

But when we came out upon the bald forehead of a burnt cliff and

looked down, we realised the grandeur and beauty of the unseen

voice that we had been following. A river of splendid strength

went leaping through the chasm five hundred feet below us, and at

the foot of two snow-white falls, in an oval of dark topaz water,

traced with curves of floating foam, lay the solitary island.

The broken path was like a ladder. "How shall we ever get down?"

sighed Greygown, as we dropped from rock to rock; and at the bottom

she looked up sighing, "I know we never can get back again." There

was not a foot of ground on the shores level enough for a tent.

Our canoe ferried us over, two at a time, to the island. It was

about a hundred paces long, composed of round, coggly stones, with

just one patch of smooth sand at the lower end. There was not a

tree left upon it larger than an alder-bush. The tent-poles must

be cut far up on the mountain-sides, and every bough for our beds

must be carried down the ladder of rocks. But the men were gay at

their work, singing like mocking-birds. After all, the glow of

life comes from friction with its difficulties. If we cannot find

them at home, we sally abroad and create them, just to warm up our

mettle.

The ouananiche in the island pool were superb, astonishing,

incredible. We stood on the cobble-stones at the upper end, and

cast our little flies across the sweeping stream, and for three

days the fish came crowding in to fill the barrel of pickled salmon

for our guides' winter use; and the score rose,--twelve, twenty-

one, thirty-two; and the size of the "biggest fish" steadily

mounted--four pounds, four and a half, five, five and three-

quarters. "Precisely almost six pounds," said Ferdinand, holding

the scales; "but we may call him six, M'sieu', for if it had been

to-morrow that we had caught him, he would certainly have gained

the other ounce." And yet, why should I repeat the fisherman's

folly of writing down the record of that marvellous catch? We

always do it, but we know that it is a vain thing. Few listen to

the tale, and none accept it. Does not Christopher North,

reviewing the Salmonia of Sir Humphry Davy, mock and jeer

unfeignedly at the fish stories of that most reputable writer?

But, on the very next page, old Christopher himself meanders

on into a perilous narrative of the day when he caught a whole

cart-load of trout in a Highland loch. Incorrigible, happy

inconsistency! Slow to believe others, and full of sceptical

inquiry, fond man never doubts one thing--that somewhere in the

world a tribe of gentle readers will be discovered to whom his fish

stories will appear credible.

One of our days on the island was Sunday--a day of rest in a week

of idleness. We had a few books; for there are some in existence

which will stand the test of being brought into close contact with

nature. Are not John Burroughs' cheerful, kindly essays full of

woodland truth and companionship? Can you not carry a whole

library of musical philosophy in your pocket in Matthew Arnold's

volume of selections from Wordsworth? And could there be a better

sermon for a Sabbath in the wilderness than Mrs. Slosson's immortal

story of Fishin' Jimmy?

But to be very frank about the matter, the camp is not stimulating

to the studious side of my mind. Charles Lamb, as usual, has said

what I feel: "I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I

cannot settle my spirits to it."

There are blueberries growing abundantly among the rocks--huge

clusters of them, bloomy and luscious as the grapes of Eshcol. The

blueberry is nature's compensation for the ruin of forest fires.

It grows best where the woods have been burned away and the soil is

too poor to raise another crop of trees. Surely it is an innocent

and harmless pleasure to wander along the hillsides gathering these

wild fruits, as the Master and His disciples once walked through

the fields and plucked the ears of corn, never caring what the

Pharisees thought of that new way of keeping the Sabbath.

And here is a bed of moss beside a dashing rivulet, inviting us to

rest and be thankful. Hark! There is a white-throated sparrow, on

a little tree across the river, whistling his afternoon song

"In linked sweetness long drawn out."

Down in Maine they call him the Peabody-bird, because his notes

sound to them like Old man--Peabody, peabody, peabody. In New

Brunswick the Scotch settlers say that he sings Lost--lost--

Kennedy, kennedy, kennedy. But here in his northern home I think

we can understand him better. He is singing again and again, with

a cadence that never wearies, "Sweet--sweet--Canada, canada,

canada!" The Canadians, when they came across the sea, remembering

the nightingale of southern France, baptised this little gray

minstrel their rossignol, and the country ballads are full of his

praise. Every land has its nightingale, if we only have the heart

to hear him. How distinct his voice is--how personal, how

confidential, as if he had a message for us!

There is a breath of fragrance on the cool shady air beside our

little stream, that seems familiar. It is the first week of

September. Can it be that the twin-flower of June, the delicate

Linnaea borealis, is blooming again? Yes, here is the threadlike

stem lifting its two frail pink bells above the bed of shining

leaves. How dear an early flower seems when it comes back again

and unfolds its beauty in a St. Martin's summer! How delicate and

suggestive is the faint, magical odour! It is like a renewal of

the dreams of youth.

"And need we ever grow old?" asked my lady Greygown, as she sat

that evening with the twin-flower on her breast, watching the stars

come out along the edge of the cliffs, and tremble on the hurrying

tide of the river. "Must we grow old as well as gray? Is the time

coming when all life will be commonplace and practical, and

governed by a dull 'of course'? Shall we not always find

adventures and romances, and a few blossoms returning, even when

the season grows late?"

"At least," I answered, "let us believe in the possibility, for to

doubt it is to destroy it. If we can only come back to nature

together every year, and consider the flowers and the birds, and

confess our faults and mistakes and our unbelief under these silent

stars, and hear the river murmuring our absolution, we shall die

young, even though we live long: we shall have a treasure of

memories which will be like the twin-flower, always a double

blossom on a single stem, and carry with us into the unseen world

something which will make it worth while to be immortal."

A SONG AFTER SUNDOWN

"There's no music like a little river's. It plays the same tune

(and that's the favourite) over and over again, and yet does not

weary of it like men fiddlers. It takes the mind out of doors; and

though we should be grateful for good houses, there is, after all,

no house like god's out-of-doors. And lastly, sir, it quiets a man

down like saying his prayers."--ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: Prince

Otto.

THE WOOD-NOTES OF THE VEERY

The moonbeams over Arno's vale in silver flood were pouring,

When first I heard the nightingale a long-lost love deploring:

So passionate, so full of pain, it sounded strange and eerie,

I longed to hear a simpler strain, the wood-notes of the veery.

The laverock sings a bonny lay, above the Scottish heather,

It sprinkles from the dome of day like light and love together;

He drops the golden notes to greet his brooding mate, his dearie;

I only know one song more sweet, the vespers of the veery.

In English gardens green and bright, and rich in fruity treasure,

I've heard the blackbird with delight repeat his merry measure;

The ballad was a lively one, the tune was loud and cheery,

And yet with every setting sun I listened for the veery.

O far away, and far away, the tawny thrush is singing,

New England woods at close of day with that clear chant are ringing;

And when my light of life is low, and heart and flesh are weary,

I fain would hear, before I go, the wood-notes of the veery.

End