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 This book was presented by 
 
 Clarence Poe 
 Q,H81 
 B9 
 
 NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES 
 
 S00762742 S 
 
This book is due on the date indicated 
 below and is subject to an overdue fine 
 as posted at the Circulation Desk. 
 
m^lje Hit3er0itie lliterature ^erietf 
 
 AFOOT AND AFLOAT 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN BURROUGHS 
 
 WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY 
 CLIFTON JOHNSON 
 
 _e:RO)ergiac:P re^ 
 
 BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
PUBLISHERS' NOTE 
 
 The three papers given in this volume will appeal 
 especially to the large number of boys and girls who 
 enjoy stories of boating, camping, and tramping experi- 
 ences. The first, "A Summer Boating Trip," is from 
 ** Pepacton and Other Sketches ; " the second, " Camp- 
 ing with the President," is from the " Atlantic Monthly " 
 for May, 1906; and the third, "A Tramp in the Cat- 
 skills," is a selection, complete in itself, from " Birch 
 Browsings" in "Wake-Robin." The biographical 
 sketch by Clifton Johnson will also be enjoyed by chil- 
 dren who have become familiar with Burroughs's 
 writings. 
 
 In presenting another volume of Burroughs's essays 
 in the Riverside Literature Series, the publishers feel 
 that the reception accorded the previous Burroughs 
 numbers in this series testifies to the adaptability of 
 the writings of this nature philosopher to school use. 
 The desirability of bringing children into that intimate 
 and sympathetic relationship with nature which per- 
 vades all of Mr. Burroughs's writings is apparent to 
 all teachers who recognize the need and the difiiculty 
 of inculcating a love of nature in their pupils. 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAOS 
 
 Biographical Sketch of John Burkoughs by Cufton 
 Johnson 1 
 
 A Summer Boating Trip 7 
 
 Camping with the President 36 
 
 A Tramp in the Catskills 72 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1871, 1S81, 1S99, 1907, 1909, AND 1913, BY JOHN BURROUGHS 
 COPYRIGHT, 1901, 1906, AND 1907, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
 
JOHN BURROUGHS 
 
 A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 
 
 BY CLIFTON JOHNSON 
 
 In the town of Roxbury, among the western Catskills, 
 was born April 3, 1837, John Burroughs. The house in 
 which he first saw the hght was an unpainted, squarish 
 structure, only a single story high, with a big chimney 
 in the middle. This house was removed a few years 
 later, and a better and somewhat larger one, which still 
 stands, was built in its place. The situation is very 
 pleasing. Roundabout is a varied country of heights, 
 dales, woods and pastures, and cultivated fields. The 
 dwelling is in a wide upland hollow that falls away to 
 the east and south into a deep valley, beyond which 
 rise line on line of great mounding hills. These turn 
 blue in the distance and look like immense billows 
 rolling in from a distant ocean. 
 
 There were ten children in the Burroughs family, 
 and John was the seventh of this numerous household. 
 He was a true country boy, acquainted with all the 
 hard work and all the pleasures of an old-fashioned 
 farm life. His people were poor and he had his own 
 way to make in the world, but the environment was 
 on the whole a salutarv one. 
 
 He has always had a marked affection for the place 
 of his birth, and he rejoices in the fact that from an 
 eminence near his present home on the Hudson he can 
 see mountains that are visible from his native hills. 
 
2 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 
 
 Two or three times every year he goes back to these 
 hills to renew his youth among the familiar scenes of 
 his boyhood. 
 
 " Johnnv " Burroughs, as he was known to his home 
 folks and the neighbors, was very like the other young- 
 sters of the region in his interests, his ways, and his 
 work. Yet as compared with them he undoubtedly had 
 a livelier imagination, and things made a keener im- 
 pression on his mind. In some cases his sensitiveness 
 was more disturbing than gratifying. When his grand- 
 father told "spook" stories to the children gathered 
 around the evening blaze of the kitchen fireplace, 
 John's hair would almost stand on end and he w^as 
 afraid of every shadow. 
 
 He went to school in the little red schoolhouse across 
 the valley, and as he grew older he aspired to attend 
 an academy. But he had to make the opportunity for 
 himself, and only succeeded in doing so at the age of 
 seventeen, w-hen he raised the needful money by six 
 months of teaching. This enabled him in the autumn 
 of 1854 to enter the Heading Literary Institute at 
 Ashland. He found the life there enjoyable, but his 
 funds ran low^ by spring and he was obliged to return 
 to the farm. Until September he labored among his 
 native fields, then took up teaching again. When pay 
 day came he set off for a seminary of some note at 
 Cooperstown, w^here a single term brought his student 
 days forever to a close, and after another period of farm 
 work at home he borrowed a small sum of money and 
 journeyed to Illinois. Near Freeport he secured a 
 school at forty dollars a month, w hich was much more 
 than he could have earned in the East. Yet he gave up 
 his position at the end of six months. " I came back.'* 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 3 
 
 he says, " because of ' the girl I left behind me; ' and it 
 was pretty hard to stay even as long as I did." 
 
 Soon afterward he married. His total capital at the 
 time was fifty dollars, a sum which was reduced one 
 fifth by the wedding expenses. For several years he 
 continued to teach, and at the age of twenty-five we 
 find him in charge of a school near West Point. Up to 
 this time his interest in nature and his aptitude for 
 observation lay dormant. But now it was awakened 
 by reading a volume of Audubon which chanced to fall 
 into his hands. That was a revelation, and he went to 
 the woods with entirely new interest and enthusiasm. 
 He began at once to get acquainted with the birds, his 
 vision grew keen and alert, and birds he had passed by 
 before, he now saw at once. 
 
 Meanwhile the Civil War was going on, and it 
 aroused in Burroughs a strong desire to enlist. He 
 visited Washington to get a closer view of army life, 
 but what he saw of it rather damped his military ardor. 
 It seemed to him that the men were driven about and 
 herded like cattle; and when a peaceful position in the 
 Treasury Department was offered him he accepted it, 
 and for nine years was a Government clerk. 
 
 At the Treasury he guarded a vault and kept a record 
 of the monev that went in or out. The duties were not 
 arduous, and in his long intervals of leisure his mind 
 wandered far afield. It dwelt on the charm of flitting 
 wnngs and bird melodies, on the pleasures of rambling 
 along country roads and into the woodlands; and, sit- 
 ting before the Treasury vault, at a high desk and facing 
 an iron wall he began to write. There was no need for 
 notes. His memory was all-sufficient, and the result was 
 the essays which make " W^ake-Robin," — his first book. 
 
4 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 
 
 By 1873 Burroughs had had enough of the routine 
 of a' Government clerkship, and he resigned to become 
 the receiver of a bank in Middletown, New York. 
 Later he accepted a position as bank examiner in the 
 eastern part of the State. But his longing to return to 
 the soil was growing apace, and presently he bought a 
 little farm on the west shore of the Hudson. He at once 
 erected a substantial stone house and started orchards 
 and vineyards, yet it was not until 1885 that he feU he 
 could relinquish his Government position and dwell 
 on his own land with the assurance of a safe support. 
 
 He has never been a great traveler. Still, he has 
 been abroad twice and has recently made a trip to 
 Alaska. Lesser excursions have taken him to Virginia 
 and Kentucky, and to Canada, and he has camped in 
 Maine and the Adirondacks. But the district that he 
 knows best and that he puts oftenest into his nature 
 studies is his home country in the Catskills and the 
 region about his "Riverby" farm. Very little of his 
 writing, however, has been done in the house in which 
 he lives. This was never a wholly satisfactory workinf]^ 
 place. He felt he must get away from all conventional- 
 ities, and he early put up on the outskirts of his vine- 
 yards a little bark-covered study, to which it has been 
 his habit to retire for his indoor thinking and writing. 
 He still uses this study more or less, and often in the 
 summer evenings sits in an easy chair, under an ay)ple- 
 tree just outside the door, and listens to the voices of 
 Nature while he looks off across the Hudson. 
 
 But the spot that at present most engages his affec- 
 tion is a reclaimed woodland swamp, back among 
 some rocky hills, a mile or two from the river. A few 
 years ago the swamp was a wild tangle of brush and 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH S 
 
 stumps, fallen trees and murky pools. Now it has been 
 cleared and drained, and the dark forest mould pro- 
 duces wonderful crops of celery, sweet corn, potatoes, 
 and other vegetables. On a shoulder of rock near the 
 swamp borders Burroughs has built a rustic house, 
 sheathed outside with slabs, and smacking in all its 
 arrangements of the woodlands and of the days of 
 pioneering. It has an open fireplace, where the flames 
 crackle cheerfully on chilly evenings, and over the 
 fireplace coals most of the cooking is done ; but in really 
 hot weather an oil stove serves instead. 
 
 On the other side of the hollow a delightfully cold 
 spring bubbles forth, and immediately back of the 
 house is a natural cavern which makes an ideal storage 
 place for perishable foods. The descent to the cavern 
 is made by a rude ladder, and the sight of Burroughs 
 coming and going between it and the house has a most 
 suggestive touch of the wild and romantic. 
 
 He is often at " Slabsides " — sometimes for weeks 
 or months at a time, though he always makes daily 
 visits to the valley to look after the work in his vine- 
 yards and to visit the post-office at the railway station. 
 He is a leisurelv man, to whom haste and the nervous 
 pursuit of wealth or fame are totally foreign. He thor- 
 oughly enjoys country loitering, and when he gets a 
 hint of anything interesting or new going on among 
 the birds and little creatures of the fields, he likes to 
 stop and investigate. His ears are remarkably quick 
 and his eyes and sense of smell phenomenally acute, 
 and much which to most of us would be unperceived 
 or meaningless he reads as if it were an open book. Best 
 of all, he has the power of imparting his enjoyment, 
 and what he writes is full of outdoor fragrance, racy, 
 
6 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 
 
 piquant, and individual. His snap and vivacity are 
 wholly unartificial. They are a part of the man — a 
 man full of imagination and sensitiveness, a philoso- 
 pher, a humorist, a hater of shams and pretension. 
 The tenor of his life changes little from year to year, 
 his affections remain steadfast, and this hardy, gray 
 poet of things rural will continue, as ever, the warm- 
 hearted nature enthusiast, and inspirer t>A" the love of 
 nature in others. 
 
AFOOT AND AFLOAT 
 
 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 When one summer day I bethought me of a voyage 
 down the east or Pepacton branch of the Delaware, 
 I seemed to want some excuse for the start, some send- 
 off, some preparation, to give the enterprise genesis 
 and head. This I found in building my own boat. It 
 was a happy thought. How else should I have got 
 under wav, how else should I have raised the breeze ? 
 The boat-building warmed the blood; it made the 
 germ take; it whetted my appetite for the voyage. 
 There is nothing like serving an apprenticeship to for- 
 tune, like earning the right to your tools. In most 
 enterprises the temptation is always to begin too far 
 alons ; we want to start where somebodv else leaves off. 
 Go back to the stump, and see what an impetus you 
 get. Those fishermen who wind their own flies before 
 they go a-fishing, — how they bring in the trout ; and 
 those hunters who run their own bullets or make their 
 own cartridges, — the game is already mortgaged to 
 them. 
 
 When my boat was finished — and it was a very 
 simple affair — I was eager as a boy to be off ; I feared 
 the river would all run bv before I could wet her bot- 
 torn in it. This enthusiasm begat great expectations 
 of the trip. I should surely surprise Nature and win 
 some new secrets from her. I should glide down noise- 
 lessly upon her and see what all those willow screens 
 
8 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 and baffling curves concealed. As a fisherman and 
 pedestrian I had been able to come at the stream only 
 at certain points: now the most private and secluded 
 retreats of the nymph would be opened to me; every 
 bend and eddy, every cove hedged in by swamps or 
 passage walled in by high alders, would be at the beck 
 of my paddle. 
 
 Whom shall one take with him when he goes a-court- 
 ing Nature ? This is always a vital question. There 
 are persons who will stand between you and that which 
 you seek: they obtrude themselves; they monopolize 
 your attention; they blunt your sense of the shy, half- 
 revealed intelligences about you. I want for companion 
 a dog or a boy, or a person who has the virtues of dogs 
 and boys, — transparency, good-nature, curiosity, open 
 sense, and a nameless quality that is akin to trees and 
 growths and the inarticulate forces of nature. With 
 him you are alone, and yet have company ; you are free ; 
 you feel no disturbing element ; the influences of nature 
 stream through him and around him; he is a good con- 
 ductor of the subtle fluid. The quality or qualification 
 I refer to belongs to most persons who spend their lives 
 in the open air, — to soldiers, hunters, fishers, laborers, 
 and to artists and poets of the right sort. How full of 
 it, to choose an illustrious example, was such a man as 
 Walter Scott! 
 
 But no such person came in answer to my prayer, so 
 I set out alone. 
 
 It was fit that I put my boat into the water at Ark- 
 ville, but it may seem a little incongruous that I should 
 launch her into Dry Brook; vet Drv Brook is here a 
 fine large trout stream, and I soon found its waters 
 were wet enough for all practical purposes. The Dela- 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 9 
 
 ware is only one mile distant, and I chose this as the 
 easiest road from the station to it. A young farmer 
 helped me carry the boat to the water, but did not stay 
 to see me off; only some calves feeding alongshore wit- 
 nessed my embarkation. It would have been a godsend 
 to boys, but there were no boys about. I stuck on a rift 
 before I had gone ten yards, and saw with misgiving 
 the paint transferred from the bottom of my little 
 scow to the tops of the stones thus early in the journey. 
 But I was soon making fair headway, and taking trout 
 for my dinner as I floated along. My first mishap was 
 when I broke the second joint of my rod on a bass, 
 and the first serious impediment to my progress was 
 when I encountered the trunk of a prostrate elm 
 bridging the stream within a few inches of the surface. 
 My rod mended and the elm cleared, I anticipated 
 better sailing when I should reach the Delaware itself; 
 but I found on this day and on subsequent days that 
 the Delaware has a way of dividing up that is very 
 embarrassing to the navigator. It is a stream of many 
 minds: its waters cannot long agree to go all in the 
 same channel, and whichever branch I took I was 
 pretty sure to wish I had taken one of the others. I w^as 
 constantly sticking on rifts, where I would have to 
 dismount, or running full tilt into willow banks, where 
 I would lose my hat or endanger my fishing-tackle. 
 On the whole, the result of my first day's voyaging was 
 not encouraging. I made barely eight miles, and my 
 ardor was a good deal dampened, to say nothing about 
 my clothing. In mid-afternoon I went to a well-to-do- 
 looking farmhouse and got some milk, which I am 
 certain the thrifty housewife skimmed, for its blueness 
 infected my spirits, and I went into camp that night 
 
10 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 more than half persuaded to abandon the enterprise 
 in the morning. The lonehness of the river, too, unhke 
 that of the fields and woods, to which I was more accus- 
 tomed, oppressed me. In the woods, things are close to 
 you, and you touch them and seem to interchange 
 something with them; but upon the river, even though 
 it be a narrow and shallow one like this, you are more 
 isolated, farther removed from the soil and its attrac- 
 tions, and an easier prey to the unsocial demons. The 
 long, unpeopled vistas ahead; the still dark eddies; 
 the endless monotone and soliloquy of the stream; the 
 unheeding rocks basking like monsters along the shore, 
 half out of the water, half in ; a solitary heron starting 
 up here and there, as you rounded some point, and 
 flapping disconsolately ahead till lost to view, or stand- 
 ing like a gaunt spectre on the umbrageous side of the 
 mountain, his motionless form revealed against the 
 dark green as you passed; the trees and willows and 
 alders that hemmed vou in on either side, and hid the 
 fields and the farmhouses and the road that ran 
 near by, — these things and others aided the skimmed 
 milk to cast a gloom over my spirits that argued ill 
 for the success of my undertaking. Those rubber boots, 
 too, that parboiled my feet and were clogs of lead about 
 them, — whose spirits are elastic enough to endure 
 them ? A malediction upon the head of him who in- 
 vented them! Take vour old shoes, that will let the 
 water in and let it out again, rather than stand knee- 
 deep all day in these extinguishers. 
 
 I escaped from the river, that first night, and took to 
 the woods, and profited by the change. In the w^oods 
 I was at home again, and the bed of hemlock boughs 
 salved my spirits. A cold spring run came down off 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP n 
 
 the mountain, and beside it, underneath birches and 
 hemlocks, I improvised my hear^^hstone. In sleeping 
 on the ground it is a great advantage to have a back- 
 log; it braces and supports you, and it is a bedfellow 
 that will not grumble when, in the middle of the niirht, 
 you crowd sharply up against it. It serves to keep in 
 the warmth, also. A heavy stone or other point de re- 
 sistance at your feet is also a help. Or, better still, 
 scoop out a little place in the earth, a few inches deep, 
 so as to admit your body from your hips to your shoul- 
 ders; you thus get an equal bearing the whole length 
 of you. I am told the Western hunters and guides do 
 this. On the same principle, the sand makes a good 
 bed, and the snow. You make a mould in which you 
 fit nicely. My berth that night was between two logs 
 that the barkpeelers had stripped ten or more years 
 before. As they had left the bark there, and as hem- 
 lock bark makes excellent fuel, I had more reasons 
 than one to be grateful to them. 
 
 In the morning I felt much refreshed, and as if the 
 night had tided me over the bar that threatened to stay 
 my progress. If I can steer clear of skimmed milk, I 
 said, I shall now finish the voyage of fiftv miles to 
 Hancock with increasing pleasure. 
 
 When one breaks camp in the morning, he turns 
 back again and again to see what he has left. Surely, 
 he feels, he has forgotten something; what is it? But 
 it is only his own sad thoughts and musings he has left, 
 the fragment of his life he has lived there. Where he 
 hung his coat on the tree, where he slept on the boughs, 
 where he made his coffee or broiled his trout over the 
 coals, where he drank again and again at the little 
 brown pool in the spring run, where he looked long 
 
12 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 and lonc^ up into the whispering branches overhead, 
 he has left what he cannot bring away with him, — 
 the flame and the ashes of himself. 
 
 Of certain game-birds it is thought that at times 
 they have the power of withholding their scent; no 
 hint or particle of themselves goes out upon the air. 
 I think there are persons whose spiritual pores are al- 
 ways sealed up, and I presume they have the best time 
 of it. Their hearts never radiate into the void ; they 
 do not yearn and sympathize without return; they 
 do not leave themselves by the wayside as the sheep 
 leaves her wool upon the brambles and thorns. 
 
 This branch of the Delaware, so far as I could learn, 
 had never before been descended by a white man in 
 a boat. Rafts of pine and hemlock timber are run 
 down on the spring and fall freshets, but of pleasure- 
 seekers in boats I appeared to be the first. Hence my 
 advent was a surprise to most creatures in the water 
 and out. I surprised the cattle in the field, and those 
 ruminating leg-deep in the water turned their heads 
 at my approach, swallowed their unfinished cuds, and 
 scampered off as if they had seen a spectre. I sur- 
 prised the fish on their spawning beds and feeding 
 grounds; they scattered, as my shadow glided down 
 upon them, like chickens when a hawk appears. I 
 surprised an ancient fisherman seated on a spit of 
 gravelly beach, with his back up stream, and leisurely 
 angling in a deep, still eddy, and mumbling to him- 
 self. As I shd into the circle of his vision his grip on 
 his pole relaxed, his jaw dropped, and he was too be- 
 wildered to reply to my salutation for some moments. 
 As I turned a bend in the river I looked back, and saw 
 him hastening away with great precipitation. I pre- 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 13 
 
 sume he had angled there for forty years without hav- 
 ing his privacy thus intruded upon. I surprised hawks 
 and herons and kingfishers. I came suddenly upon 
 muskrats, and raced with them down the rifts, they 
 having no time to take to their holes. At one point, 
 as I rounded an elbow in the stream, a black eagle 
 sprang from the top of a dead tree, and flapped hur- 
 riedly away. A kingbird gave chase, and disappeared 
 for some moments in the gulf between the great wings 
 of the eagle, and I imagined him seated upon his 
 back delivering his puny blows upon the royal bird. 
 I interrupted two or three minks fishing and hunting 
 alongshore. They would dart under the bank when 
 they saw me, then presently thrust out their sharp, 
 weasel-like noses, to see if the danger was imminent. 
 At one point, in a little cove behind the willows, 
 I surprised some schoolgirls, with skirts amazingly 
 abbreviated, wading and playing in the water. And 
 as much surprised as any, I am sure, was that hard- 
 worked looking housewife, when I came up from under 
 the bank in front of her house, and with pail in hand 
 appeared at her door and asked for milk, taking the 
 precaution to intimate that I had no objection to the 
 yellow scum that is supposed to rise on a fresh article 
 of that kind. 
 
 " What kind of milk do vou want ? " 
 
 "The best you have. Give me two quarts of it," 
 I replied. 
 
 " What do vou want to do with it ? " with an anxious 
 tone, as if I might want to blow up something or burn 
 her barns with it. 
 
 "Oh, drink it," I answered, as if I frequently put 
 milk to that use. 
 
14 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 "Well, I suppose I can get you some;" and she 
 presently reappeared with swimming pail, with those 
 little yellow flakes floating about upon it that one likes 
 
 to see. 
 
 I passed several low dams the second day, but had 
 ao trouble. I dismounted and stood upon the apron, 
 and the boat, with plenty of line, came over as lightly 
 as a chip, and swung around in the eddy below like 
 a steed that knows its master. In the afternoon, while 
 slowly drifting down a long eddy, the moist southwest 
 wind brought me the welcome odor of strawberries, 
 and running ashore by a meadow, a short distance 
 below, I was soon parting the daisies and filling my 
 cup with the dead-ripe fruit. Berries, be they red, 
 blue, or black, seem like a special providence to the 
 camper-out; they are luxuries he has not counted on, 
 and I prized these accordingly. Later in the day it 
 threatened rain, and I drew up to shore under the shel- 
 ter of some thick overhanging hemlocks, and proceeded 
 to eat my berries and milk, glad of an excuse not to 
 delay my lunch longer. While tarrying here I heard 
 young voices up stream, and looking in that direction 
 saw two boys coming down the rapids on rude floats. 
 They were racing along at a lively pace, each with a 
 pole in his hand, dexterously avoiding the rocks and 
 the breakers, and schooling themselves thus early in 
 the duties and perils of the raftsman. As they saw me 
 one observed to the other, — 
 
 "There is the man we saw go by when we were 
 building our floats. If w^e had known he was coming 
 so far, maybe we could have got him to give us a ride." 
 
 They drew near, guided their crafts to shore beside 
 me, and tied up, their poles answering for haw^sers. 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 13 
 
 They proved to be Johnny and Denny Dwire, aged 
 ten and twelve. They were friendly boys, and though 
 not a bit bashful were not a bit impertinent. And 
 Johnny, who did the most of the talking, had such a 
 sweet musical voice; it was like a bird's. It seems 
 Denny had run away, a day or two before, to his uncle'i 
 five miles above, and Johnny had been after him, and 
 was bringing his prisoner home on a float; and it v/as 
 hard to tell which was enjoying the fun most, the cap- 
 tor or the captured. 
 
 " Why did you run away ? " said I to Denny. 
 
 "Oh, 'cause," replied he, with an air which said 
 plainly, "The reasons are too numerous to mention." 
 
 "Boys, you know, will do so, sometimes," said 
 Johnny, and he smiled upon his brother in a way that 
 made me think they had a very good understanding 
 upon the subject. 
 
 They could both swim, yet their floats looked very 
 perilous, — three pieces of old plank or slabs, with 
 two cross-pieces and a fragment of a board for a rider, 
 and made without nails or withes. 
 
 "In some places," said Johnny, "one plank was 
 here and another ofi" there, but we managed, some- 
 how, to keep atop of them." 
 
 " Let 's leave our floats here, and ride with him the 
 rest of the way," said one to the other. 
 
 "All right; may we, mister?" 
 
 I assented, and we were soon afloat again. How 
 they enjoyed the passage; how smooth it was; how 
 the boat glided along; how quickly she felt the paddle! 
 They admired her much ; they praised my steersman 
 ship; they praised my fish-pole and all my fixings dovm 
 to my hateful rubber boots. When w^e stuck op the 
 
16 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 rifts, as we did several times, they leaped out quickly, 
 with their bare feet and legs, and pushed us off. 
 
 *' I think," said Johnny, " if you keep her straight 
 and let her have her own way, she will find the deepest 
 water. Don't you, Denny ? " 
 
 "I think she will," replied Denny; and I found the 
 boys were pretty nearly right. 
 
 I tried them on a point of natural history. I had 
 observed, coming along, a great many dead eels lying 
 on the bottom of the river, that I supposed had died 
 from spear wounds. "No," said Jolinny, "they are 
 lamper-eels. They die as soon as they have built their 
 nests and laid their eggs." 
 
 " Are you sure ? " 
 
 "That's what they all say, and I know they are 
 
 lampers." 
 
 So I fished one up out of the deep water with my 
 paddle-blade and examined it; and sure enough it w^as 
 a lamprey. There was the row of holes along its head, 
 and its ugly suction mouth. I had noticed their nests, 
 too, all along, where the water in the pools shallowed to 
 a few feet and began to hurry toward the rifts: they 
 were low mounds of small stones, as if a bushel or more 
 of large pebbles had been dumped upon the river bot- 
 tom; occasionallv thev were so near the surface as to 
 make a big ripple. The eel attaches itself to the stones 
 by its mouth, and thus moves them at will. An old 
 fisherman told me that a strong man could not pull 
 a large lamprey loose from a rock to which it had at- 
 tached itself. It fastens to its prey in this way, and 
 sucks the life out. A friend of mine savs he once saw 
 in the St. Lawrence a pike as long as his arm with a 
 lamprey eel attached to him. The fish was nearly 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 17 
 
 dead and was quite white, the eel had so sucked out 
 his blood and substance. The fish, when seized, darts 
 against rocks and stones, and tries in vain to rub the 
 eel off, then succumbs to the sucker. 
 
 "The lampers do not all die," said Denny, "be- 
 cause they do not all spawn;" and I observed that 
 the dead ones were all of one size and doubtless of the 
 same age. 
 
 The lamprey is the octopus, the devil-fish, of these 
 waters, and there is, perhaps, no tragedy enacted here 
 that equals that of one of these vampires slowly suck- 
 ing the life out of a bass or a trout. 
 
 My boys went to school part of the time. Did they 
 have a good teacher ? 
 
 " Good enough for me," said Johnny. 
 
 " Good enough for me," echoed Denny. 
 
 Just below Bark-a-boom — the name is worth 
 keeping — they left me. I was loath to part with them; 
 their musical voices and their thorough good-fellow- 
 ship had been very acceptable. With a little persua- 
 sion, I think they would have left their home and hum- 
 ble fortunes, and gone a-roving with me. 
 
 About four o'clock the warm, vapor-laden south- 
 west wind brought forth the expected thunder-shower. 
 I saw the storm rapidly developing behind the moun- 
 tains in my front. Presently I came in sight of a long 
 covered wooden bridge that spanned the river about 
 a mile ahead, and I put my paddle into the water with 
 all my force to reach this cover before the storm. It 
 was neck and neck most of the way. The storm had 
 the wind, and I had it — in my teeth. The bridge was 
 at Shavertown, and it was by a close shave that I got 
 under it before the rain was upon me. How it poured 
 
18 A SUxMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 and rattled and whipped in around the abutment of 
 the bridge to reach me ! I looked out well satisfied upon 
 the foaming water, upon the wet, unpainted houses 
 and barns of the Shavertowners, and upon the trees, 
 
 "Caught and cuffed by the gale." 
 
 Another traveler — the spotted-winged nighthawk — 
 was also roughly used by the storm. He faced it bravely, 
 and beat and beat, but was unable to stem it, or even 
 hold his own ; gradually he drifted back, till he was lost 
 to siirht in the wet obscurity. The water in the river 
 rose an inch while I waited, about three quarters of an 
 hour. Only one man, I reckon, saw me in Shavertown, 
 and he came and gossiped with me from the bank 
 above when the storm had abated. 
 
 The second night I stopped at the sign of the elm- 
 tree. The woods were too w^et, and I concluded to 
 make my boat my bed. A superb elm, on a smooth 
 grassy plain a few feet from the water's edge, looked 
 hospitable in the twilight, and I drew my boat up 
 beneath it. I hung my clothes on the jagged edges of 
 its rough bark, and went to bed with the moon, " in her 
 third quarter," peeping under the branches upon me. 
 I had been reading Stevenson's amusing "Travels 
 with a Donkey," and the lines he pretends to quote 
 from an old play kept running in my head : — • 
 
 "The bed was made, the room was fit. 
 By punctual eve the stars were lit; 
 The air was sweet, the water ran; 
 No need was there for maid or man. 
 When we put up, my ass and I, 
 At God's green caravanserai." 
 
 But the stately elm played me a trick: it slyly and at 
 iong intervals let great drops of water down upon me. 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 19 
 
 now with a sharp smack upon my rubber coat; then 
 with a heavy thud upon the seat in the bow or stern 
 of my boat; then plump into my upturned ear, or upon 
 my uncovered arm, or with a ring into my tin cup, or 
 with a splash into my coffee-pail that stood at my side 
 full of water from a spring I had just passed. After 
 two hours' trial I found dropping off to sleep, under 
 such circumstances, was out of the question ; so I sprang 
 up, in no very amiable mood toward my host, and drew 
 my boat clean from under the elm. I had refreshing 
 slumber thenceforth, and the birds were astir in the 
 morning long before I was. 
 
 There is one way, at least, in which the denuding 
 the country of its forests has lessened the rainfall: in 
 certain conditions of the atmosphere every tree is a 
 great condenser of moisture, as I had just observed 
 in the case of the old elm ; little showers are generated 
 in their branches, and in the aggregate the amount 
 of water precipitated in this way is considerable. Of 
 a foggy summer morning one may see little puddles of 
 water standing on the stones beneath maple-trees, 
 alono; the street ; and in winter, when there is a sudden 
 change from cold to warm, with fog, the water fairly 
 runs down the trunks of the trees, .and streams from 
 their naked branches. The temperature of the tree is 
 so much below that of the atmosphere in such cases 
 that the condensation is very rapid. In lieu of these 
 arboreal rains we have the dew upon the grass, but it 
 is doubtful if the grass ever drips as does a tree. 
 
 The birds, I say, were astir in the morning before 
 I was, and some of them were more wakeful through 
 the night, unless they sing in their dreams. At this 
 season one may hear at intervals numerous bird voices 
 
go A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 during the night. The whip-poor-will was piping when 
 I lay down, and I still heard one when I woke up aftf-r 
 midnight. I heard the song sparrow and the kingbird 
 also/ like watchers calling the hour, and several times 
 I heard the cuckoo. Indeed, I am convinced that our 
 cuckoo is to a considerable extent a night bird, and 
 that he moves about freely from tree to tree. His pecu- 
 liar guttural note, now here, now there, may be heard 
 almost any summer night, in any part of the country, 
 and occasionally his better known cuckoo call. He is 
 a great recluse by day, but seems to wander abroad 
 freely by night. 
 
 The birds do indeed begin with the day. The farmer 
 who is in the field at work while he can yet see stars 
 catches their first matin hymns. In the longest June 
 days the robin strikes up about half past three o'clock, 
 and is quickly followed by the song sparrow, the oriole, 
 the catbird, the wren, the wood thrush, and all the rest 
 of the tuneful choir. Along the Potomac I have heard 
 the Virginia cardinal whistle so loudly and persistently 
 in the treetops above, that sleeping after four o'clock 
 was out of the question. Just before the sun is up, 
 there is a marked lull, during which, I imagine, the 
 birds are at breakfast.. While building their nest, it is 
 very early in the morning that they put in their big 
 strokes; the back of their day's work is broken before 
 you have begun yours. 
 
 A lady once asked me if there was any individuality 
 among the birds, or if those of the same kind were as 
 near alike as two peas. I was obliged to answer that 
 to the eye those of the same species were as near alike 
 as two peas, but that in their songs there were often 
 marks of originality. Caged or domesticated birds 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 21 
 
 develop notes and traits of their own, and among the 
 more famiHar orchard and garden birds one ma}? 
 notice the same tendency. I observe a great variety 
 of songs, and even quahties of voice, among the orioles 
 and among the song sparrows. On this trip my ear was 
 especially attracted to some striking and original spar- 
 row songs. At one point I was half afraid I had let 
 pass an opportunity to identify a new warbler, but 
 finally concluded it was a song sparrow. On another 
 occasion I used to hear day after day a sparrow that 
 appeared to have some organic defect in its voice : part 
 of its song was scarcely above a whisper, as if the bird 
 was suffering from a very bad cold. I have heard a 
 bobolink and a hermit thrush with similar defects of 
 voice. I have heard a robin with a part of the whistle 
 of the quail in his song. It was out of time and out of 
 tune, but the robin seemed insensible of the incon- 
 gruity, and sang as loudly and as joyously as any of 
 his mates. A catbird will sometimes show a special 
 genius for mimicry, and I have known one to suggest 
 very plainly some notes of the bobolink. 
 
 There are numerous long covered bridges spanning 
 the Delaware, and under some of these I saw the cliff 
 swallow at home, the nests being fastened to the under 
 sides of the timbers, — as it were, suspended from the 
 ceiling instead of being planted upon the shelving or 
 perpendicular side, as is usual with them. To have 
 iaid the foundation, indeed, to have sprung the vault 
 downward and finished it successfully, must have 
 required special engineering skill. I had never before 
 seen or heard of these nests being so placed. But birds 
 are quick to adjust their needs to the exigencies of any 
 case. Not long before, I had seen in a deserted house. 
 
22 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 on the head of the Rondout, the chimney swallows 
 entering the chamber through a stove-pipe hole in the 
 roof, and gluing their nests to the sides of the rafters, 
 like the barn swallows. 
 
 I was now, on the third day, well down in the 
 wilds of Colchester, with a current that made between 
 two and three miles an hour, — just a summer idler's 
 pace. The atmosphere of the rive- had improved much 
 since the first day, — was, indeed, without taint, — 
 and the water was sweet and good. There were farm- 
 houses at intervals of a mile or so; but the amount of 
 tillable land in the river valley or on the adjacent 
 mountains was very small. Occasionally there would 
 be fortv or fiftv acres of flat, usually in grass or corn, 
 with a thrifty looking farmhouse. One could see how 
 surely the land made the house and its surroundings ; 
 good land bearing good buildings, and poor land poor. 
 
 In mid-forenoon I reached the long placid eddy at 
 Downsville, and here again fell in with two boys. They 
 were out paddling about in a boat when I drew near, 
 and thev evidently regarded me in the light of a rare 
 prize which fortune had wafted them. 
 
 " Ain't you glad we come, Benny ? " I heard one of 
 them observe to the other, as they were conducting 
 me to the best place to land. They were bright, good 
 boys, off the same piece as my acquaintances of the 
 day before, and about the same ages, — differing only 
 in being village boys. AYith what curiosity they looked 
 me over! Where had I come from; where was I going; 
 how long had I been on the wav; who built mv boat; 
 was I a carpenter, to build such a neat craft, etc. ? 
 They never had seen such a traveler before. Had I had 
 no mishaps ? And then the}^ bethought them of the 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 23 
 
 dangerous passes that awaited me, and in good faith 
 began to warn and advise me. They had heard the 
 tales of raftsmen, and had conceived a vivid idea of the 
 perils of the river below, gauging their notions of it 
 from the spring and fall freshets tossing about the 
 heavy and cumbrous rafts. There was a whirlpool, a 
 rock eddy, and a binocle within a mile. I might be 
 caught in the binocle, or engulfed in the whirlpool, or 
 smashed up in the eddy. But I felt much reassured 
 when they told me I had already passed several whirl- 
 pools and rock eddies; but that terrible binocle, — 
 what was that ? I had never heard of such a monster. 
 Oh, it was a still, miry place at the head of a big eddy. 
 The current might carry me up there, but I could 
 easily get out again; the rafts did. But there was an- 
 other place I must beware of, where two eddies faced 
 each other; raftsmen were sometimes swept off there 
 by the oars and drowned. And when I came to rock 
 eddy, which I would know, because the river divided 
 there (a part of the water being afraid to risk the 
 eddy, I suppose), I must go ashore and survey the 
 pass; but in any case it would be prudent to keep to 
 the left. I might stick on the rift, but that was nothing 
 to being wrecked upon those rocks. The boys v/ere 
 quite in earnest, and I told them I would walk up to 
 the village and post some letters to my friends before 
 [ braved all these dangers. So they marched me up 
 the street, pointing out to their chums what they had 
 found. 
 
 " Going way to Phil — What place is that near 
 where the river goes into the sea ? " 
 
 " Philadelphia ? " 
 
 " Yes ; thinks he may go way there. Won't he have 
 fun ? " 
 
24 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 The boys escorted me about the town, then back to 
 the river, and got in their boat and came down to the 
 bend, where they could see me go through the whirl- 
 pool and pass the binocle (I am not sure about the 
 orthography of the word, but I suppose it means a 
 double, or a sort of mock eddy). I looked back as I 
 shot over the rough current beside a gentle vortex, 
 and saw them watching me with great interest. Rock 
 eddy, also, was quite harmless, and I passed it without 
 any preliminary survey. 
 
 I nooned at vSodom, and found good milk in a 
 humble cottage. In the afternoon I was amused by a 
 great blue heron that kept flying up in advance of me. 
 Every mile or so, as I rounded some point, I would 
 come unexpectedly upon him, till finally he grew dis- 
 gusted with my silent pursuit, and took a long turn to 
 the left up along the side of the mountain, and passed 
 back up the river, uttering a hoarse, low note. 
 
 The wind still boded rain, and about four o'clock, 
 announced by deep-toned thunder and portentous 
 clouds, it began to charge down the mountain-side in 
 front of me. I ran ashore, covered my traps, and took 
 my way up through an orchard to a quaint little farm- 
 house. But there was not a soul about, outside or in, 
 that I could find, though the door was unfastened; so 
 I went into an open shed with the hens, and lounged 
 upon some straw, while the unloosed floods came 
 down. It was better than boating or fishing. Indeed, 
 there are few summer pleasures to be placed before 
 that of reclining at ease directly under a sloping roof, 
 after toil or travel in the hot sun, and looking out into 
 the rain-drenched air and fields. It is such a vital yet 
 soothing spectacle. We sympathize with the earth. 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP * 25 
 
 We know how good a bath is, and the unspeakable 
 dehciousness of water to a parched tongue. The office 
 of the sunshine is slow, subtle, occult, unsuspected; 
 but when the clouds do their work the benefaction is 
 so palpable and copious, so direct and wholesale, that 
 all creatures take note of it, and for the most part 
 rejoice in it. It is a completion, a consummation, a 
 paying of a debt with a royal hand; the measure is 
 heaped and overflowing. It was the simple vapor of 
 water that the clouds borrowed of the earth; now they 
 pay back more than water: the drops are charged with 
 electricity and with the gases of the air, and have new 
 solvent powers. Then, how the slate is sponged off, and 
 left all clean and new again ! 
 
 In the shed where I was sheltered were many relics 
 and odds and ends of the farm. In juxtaposition with 
 two of the most stalwart wagon or truck wheels I ever 
 looked upon, was a cradle of ancient and peculiar 
 make, — an aristocratic cradle, with high-turned posts 
 and an elaborately carved and moulded bodv, that was 
 suspended upon rods and swung from the top. How 
 I should have liked to hear its historv and the storv^ of 
 the lives it had rocked, as the rain sang and the boughs 
 tossed without! Above it was the cradle of a phoebe- 
 bird saddled upon a stick that ran behind the rafter; 
 its occupants had not flown, and its story was easy to 
 read. 
 
 Soon after the first shock of the storm was over, and 
 before I could see breaking sky, the birds tuned up 
 with new ardor, — the robin, the indigo-bird, the 
 purple finch, the song sparrow, and in the meadow 
 below the bobolink. The cockerel near me followed 
 suit, and repeated his refrain till my meditations wer( 
 
26 • A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 so disturbed that I was compelled to eject him from the 
 cover, albeit he had the best right there. But he crowed 
 his defiance with drooping tail from the yard in front. 
 I, too, had mentally crowed over the good fortune of 
 the shower; but before I closed my eyes that night my 
 crest was a good deal fallen, and I could have wished 
 the friendly elements had not squared their accounts 
 quite so readily and uproariously. 
 
 The one shower did not exhaust the supply a bit; 
 Nature's hand was full of trumps yet, — yea, and 
 her sleeve, too. I stopped at a trout brook, which came 
 down out of the mountains on the right, and took a 
 few trout for my supper; but its current was too roily 
 from the shower for fly-fishing. Another farmhouse 
 attracted me, but there was no one at home ; so I picked 
 a quart of strawberries in the meadow in front, not 
 minding the wet grass, and about six o'clock, thinking 
 another storm that had been threatening on my right 
 had miscarried, I pushed off, and went floating down 
 into the deepening gloom of the river valley. The 
 mountains, densely wooded from base to summit, shut 
 in the view on every hand. They cut in from the right 
 and from the left, one ahead of the other, matchinir 
 like the teeth of an enormous trap; the river was caught 
 and bent, but not long detained, by them. Presently I 
 saw the rain creeping slowly over them in my rear, for 
 the v/ind had changed ; but I apprehended nothing but 
 a moderate sundown drizzle, such as we often get from 
 the tail end of a shower, and drew up in the eddv of a 
 big rock under an overhanging tree till it should have 
 passed. But it did-ifot pass; it thickened and deepened, 
 and reached a steady pour by the time I had calcu- 
 lated the sun would be gilding the mountain-tops. I 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 27 
 
 had wrapped my rubber coat about my blankets and 
 groceries, and bared my back to the storm. In sullen 
 silence I saw the night settling down and the rain 
 increasing; my roof -tree gave way, and every leaf 
 poured its accumulated drops upon me. There were 
 streams and splashes where before there had been 
 little more than a mist. I was getting well soaked and 
 uncomplimentary in my remarks on the weather, 
 A saucy catbird, near by, flirted and squealed very 
 plainly, " There ! there ! What did I tell you ! what did 
 I tell you! Pretty pickle! pretty pickle! pretty pickle 
 to be in!" But I had been in worse pickles, though 
 if the water had been salt my pickling had been pretty 
 thorough. Seeing the wind was in the northeast, and 
 that the weather had fairly stolen a march on me, I let 
 go my hold of the tree, and paddled rapidly to the 
 opposite shore, which was low and pebbly, drew my 
 boat up on a little peninsula, turned her over upon a 
 spot which I cleared of its coarser stone, propped 
 up one end with the seat, and crept beneath. I would 
 now test the virtues of my craft as a roof, and I found 
 she was without flaw, though she was pretty narrow. 
 The tension of her timber was such that the rain upon 
 her bottom made a low, musical hum. 
 
 Crouched on my blankets and boughs, — for I had 
 gathered a good supply of the latter before the rain 
 overtook me, — and dry only about my middle, I 
 placidly took life as it came. A great blue heron flew 
 by, and let off something like ironical horse laughter. 
 Before it became dark I proceeded to eat my supper, — 
 my berries, but not my trout. What a fuss we make 
 about the " hulls " upon strawberries ! We are hyper- 
 critical ; we may yet be glad to dine off the hulls alone. 
 
28 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 Some people see something to pick and carp at in every 
 good that comes to them; I was thankful that I had 
 the berries, and resolutely ignored their little scal- 
 loped ruflaes, which I found pleased the eye and did 
 not disturb the palate. 
 
 When bedtime arrived, I found undressing a little 
 awkward, my berth was so low; there was plenty of 
 room in the aisle, and the other passengers were no- 
 where to be seen, but I did not venture out. It rained 
 nearly all night, but the train made good speed, and 
 reached the land of davbreak nearly on time. The 
 
 »■■■ »-' 
 
 water in the river had crept up during the night to 
 within a few inches of mv boat, but I rolled over and 
 took another nap, all the same. Then I arose, had a 
 delicious bath in the sweet, swift-running current, and 
 turned my thoughts toward breakfast. The making 
 of the coffee was the only serious problem. With 
 everything soaked and a fine rain still falling, how 
 shall one build a fire ? I made my way to a little island 
 above in quest of driftwood. Before I had found the 
 wood I chanced upon another patch of delicious wild 
 strawberries, and took an appetizer of them out of 
 hand. Presently I picked up a yellow birch stick the 
 size of mv arm. The wood was decaved, but the bark 
 was perfect. I broke it in two, punched out the rotten 
 wood, and had the bark intact. The fattv or resinous 
 substance in this bark preserves it, and makes it excel- 
 lent kindling. With some seasoned twigs and a scrap 
 of paper I soon had a fire going that answered my 
 every purpose. More berries were picked while the 
 coffee was brewing, and the breakfast was a success. 
 The camper-out often finds himself in what seems 
 a distressing predicament to people seated in their 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 29 
 
 snug, well-ordered houses; but there is often a real 
 satisfaction when things come to their worst, — a sat- 
 isfaction in seeing what a small matter it is, after all; 
 that one is really neither sugar nor salt, to be afraid 
 of the wet; and that life is just as well worth living 
 beneath a scow or a dug-out as beneath the highest 
 and broadest roof in Christendom. 
 
 By ten o'clock it became necessary to move, on 
 account of the rise of the water, and as the rain had 
 abated I picked up and continued my journey. Before 
 long, however, the rain increased again, and I took 
 refuge in a barn. The snug, tree-embowered farm- 
 house looked very inviting, just across the road from 
 the barn; but as no one was about, and no faces ap- 
 peared at the window that I might judge of the inmates, 
 I contented myself with the hospitality the barn offered, 
 filling my pockets with some dry birch shavings I 
 found there where the farmer had made an ox-yoke, 
 against the needs of the next kindling. 
 
 After an hour's detention I was off again. I stopped 
 at Baxter's Brook, which flows hard by the classic 
 hamlet of Harvard, and tried for trout, but with poor 
 success, as I did not think it worth while to go far up 
 stream. 
 
 At several points I saw rafts of hemlock lumber tied 
 to the shore, ready to take advantage of the first 
 freshet. Rafting is an important industry for a hundred 
 miles or more along the Delaware. The lumbermen 
 sometimes take their families or friends, and have a 
 jollification all the way to Trenton or to Philadelphia. 
 In some places the speed is very great, almost equaling 
 that of an express train. The passage of such places 
 as Cochecton Falls and " Foul Rift " is attended with 
 
30 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 no little danger. The raft is guided by two immense 
 oars, one before and one behind. I frequently saw 
 these huge implements in the driftwood alongshore, 
 suf'c'-estin^ some colossal race of men. The raftsmen 
 have names of their own. From the upper Delaware, 
 where I had set in, small rafts are run down which 
 they call " colts." They come frisking down at a lively 
 pace. At Hancock they usually couple two rafts 
 together, when I suppose they have a span of colts; 
 or do two colts make one horse? Some parts of the 
 framework of the raft they call " grubs ; " much depends 
 upon these grubs. The lumbermen were and are a 
 hardy, virile race. The Hon. Charles Knapp, of 
 Deposit, now eighty-three years of age, but with the 
 look and step of a man of sixty, told me he had stood 
 nearly all one December day in the water to his waist, 
 reconstructing his raft, which had gone to pieces on 
 the head of an island. Mr. Knapp had passed the first 
 half of his life in Colchester and Hancock, and, 
 although no sportsman, had once taken part in a great 
 bear hunt there. The bear was an enormous one, and 
 was hard pressed by a gang of men and dogs. Their 
 muskets and assaults upon the beast with clubs had 
 made no impression. Mr. Knapp saw where the bear 
 was coming, and he thought he would show them how 
 easy it was to dispatch a bear with a club, if you only 
 knew where to strike. He had seen how quickly the 
 largest hog would wilt beneath a slight blow across the 
 "small of the back." So, armed with an immense 
 handspike, he took up a position by a large rock that 
 the bear must pass. On she came, panting and nearly 
 exhausted, and at the right moment down came the 
 club with great force upon the small of her back. " If 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 31 
 
 a fly had alighted upon her," said Mr. Knapp, " I think 
 she would have paid just as much attention to it as she 
 did to me." ^ 
 
 Early in the afternoon I encountered another boy, 
 Henry Ingersoll, who was so surprised by my sudden 
 and unwonted appearance that he did not know east 
 from west. " Which way is west ? " I inquired, to see 
 if my own head was straight on the subject. 
 
 "That way," he said, indicating east within a few 
 degrees. 
 
 " You are wrong," I repHed, " Where does the sun 
 rise ? " 
 
 " There," he said, pointing almost in the direction he 
 had pointed before. 
 
 *' But does not the sun rise in the east here as well as 
 elsewhere.^" I rejoined. 
 
 "Well, they call that west, anyhow." 
 
 But Henry's needle was subjected to a disturbing 
 influence just then. His house was near the river, and 
 he was its sole guardian and keeper for the time; his 
 father had gone up to the next neighbor's (it was Sun- 
 day), and his sister had gone with the schoolmistress 
 down the road to get black birch. He came out in 
 the road, with wide eyes, to view me as I passed, when 
 I drew rein, and demanded the points of the compass, 
 as above. Then I shook my sooty pail at him and asked 
 for milk. Yes, I could have some milk, but I would 
 have to wait till his sister came back; after he had 
 recovered a little, he concluded he could get it. He 
 came for my pail, and then his boyish curiosity ap- 
 peared. My story interested him immensely. He had 
 seen twelve summers, but he had only been four miles 
 trom home up and down the river: he had been down 
 
32 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 to the East Branch, and he had been up to Trout 
 Brook. He took a pecuniary interest in me. What did 
 my pole cost ? What my rubber coat, and what my 
 revolver? The latter he must take in his hand; he had 
 never seen such a thing to shoot with before in his life, 
 etc. He thought I might make the trip cheaper and 
 easier by stage and by the cars. He went to school : there 
 were six scholars in summer, one or two more in winter. 
 The population is not crowded in the town of Hancock, 
 certainly, and never will be. The people live close to 
 the bone, as Thoreau would sav, or rather close to the 
 stump. Many years ago the young men there resolved 
 upon having a ball. They concluded not to go to a 
 hotel, on account of the expense, and so chose a private 
 house. There was a man in the neighborhood who 
 could play the fife; he offered to furnish the music for 
 seventv-five cents. But this was deemed too much, so 
 one of the party agreed to whistle. History does not 
 tell how many beaux there were bent upon this reck- 
 less enterprise, but there were three girls. For refresh- 
 ments they bought a couple of gallons of whiskey and 
 a few pounds of sugar. When the spree was over, and 
 tke expenses were reckoned up, there was a shilling — 
 a York shilling — apiece to pay. Some of the revelers 
 were dissatisfied with this charge, and intimated that 
 the managers had not counted themselves in, but taxed 
 the whole expense upon the rest of the party. 
 
 As I moved on I saw Henrv's sister and the school- 
 mistress picking their way along the muddy road near 
 the river's bank. One of them saw me, and, dropping 
 her skirts, said to the other (I could read the motions), 
 **See that man!" The other lowered her flounces, 
 aad looked up and down the road, then glanced over 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 33 
 
 into the field, and lastly out upon the river. They 
 paused and had a good look at me, though I could see 
 that their impulse to run away, like that of a fright- 
 ened deer, was strong. 
 
 At the East Branch the Big Beaver Kill joins the 
 Delaware, almost doubling its volume. Here I struck 
 the railroad, the forlorn Midland, and here another 
 set of men and manners cropped out, — what may 
 be called the railroad conglomerate overlying this 
 mountain freestone. 
 
 " Where did you steal that boat ? " and " What you 
 running away for ? " greeted me from a hand-car that 
 went by. 
 
 I paused for some time and watched the fish hawks, 
 or ospreys, of which there were nearly a dozen sailing 
 about above the junction of the two streams, squeal- 
 ing and diving, and occasionally striking a fish on the 
 rifts. I am convinced that the fish hawk sometimes 
 feeds on the wing. I saw him do it on this and on an- 
 other occasion. He raises himself by a peculiar mo- 
 tion, and brings his head and his talons together, and 
 apparently takes a bite of a fish. While doing this his 
 flight presents a sharply undulating line; at the crest 
 of each rise the morsel is taken. 
 
 In a long, deep eddy under the west shore I came 
 upon a brood of wild ducks, the hooded merganser. 
 The young were about half grown, but of course en- 
 tirely destitute of plumage. They started off at great 
 speed, kicking the water into foam behind them, the 
 mother duck keeping upon their flank and rear. Near 
 the outlet of the pool I saw them go ashore, and I ex- 
 pected they would conceal themselves in the woods j 
 but as I drev/ near the place they came out, and I saV 
 
34 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 
 
 by their motions they were going to make a rush by 
 me up stream. At a signal from the old one, on they 
 came, and passed within a few feet of me. It was 
 almost incredible, the speed they made. Their pink 
 feet were like swiftly revolving wheels placed a little 
 to the rear; their breasts just skimmed the surface, 
 and the water was beaten into spray behind them. 
 They had no need of wings; even the mother bird did 
 not use hers; a steamboat could hardly have kept up 
 with them. I dropped my paddle and cheered. They 
 kept the race up for a long distance, a«d I saw them 
 making a fresh spirt as I entered upon the rift and 
 dropped quickly out of sight. I next disturbed an 
 eagle in his meditations upon a dead treetop, and a cat 
 sprang out of some weeds near the foot of the tree. 
 Was he watching for puss, while she was watching 
 for some smaller prey ? 
 
 I passed Partridge Island — which is or used to 
 be the name of a post-office — unwittingly, and en- 
 camped for the night on an island near Hawk's Point. 
 I slept in my boat on the beach, and in the morning 
 mv locks were literally wet with the dews of the night, 
 and my blankets too; so I waited for the sun to dry 
 them. As I was gathering driftwood for a fire, a voice 
 came over from the shadows of the east shore : " Seems 
 to me you lay abed pretty late!" 
 
 "I call this early," I rejoined, glancing at the sun 
 "Wall, it may be airly in the forenoon, but it ain't 
 airly in the mornin';" a distinction I was forced to 
 admit. Before I had reembarked some cows came 
 down to the shore, and I watched them ford the river 
 to the island. They did it with great ease and preci- 
 sion. I was told they will sometimes, during high water, 
 
A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 35 
 
 swim over to the islands, striking in well up stream, 
 and swimming diagonally across. At one point some 
 cattle had crossed the river, and evidently got into 
 mischief, for a large dog rushed them down the bank 
 into the current, and worried them all the way over, 
 part of the time swimming and part of the time leap- 
 ing very high, as a dog will in deep snow, coming down 
 with a great splash. The cattle were shrouded with 
 spray as they ran, and altogether it was a novel pic- 
 ture. 
 
 My voyage ended that forenoon at Hancock, and 
 was crowned by a few idyllic days with some friends 
 in their cottage in the woods by Lake Oquaga, a body 
 of crystal water on the hills near Deposit, and a haven 
 as peaceful and perfect as voyager ever came to port 
 
 ID.. 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 At the time I made the trip to Yellowstone Park 
 with President Roosevelt in the spring of 1903, I pro- 
 mised some friends to wTite up my impressions of the 
 President and of the Park, but I have been slow in 
 getting around to it. The President himself, having 
 the absolute leisure and peace of the White House, 
 wrote his account of the trip nearly two years ago! 
 But with the stress and strain of my life at " Slabsides," 
 — administering the affairs of so many of the wild 
 creatures of the woods about me, — I have not till 
 this blessed season found the time to put on record 
 an account of the most interesting thing I saw in that 
 wonderful land, which, of course, was the President 
 himself. 
 
 When I accepted his invitation I was well aware 
 that during the journey I should be in a storm centre 
 ^ost of the time, which is not always a pleasant })ros- 
 pect to a man of my habits and disposition. The Pre- 
 sident himself is a good deal of a storm, — a man of 
 such abounding energy and ceaseless activity that 
 he sets everything in motion around him w^herever 
 he goes. But I knew he would be pretty well occupied 
 on his way to the Park in speaking to eager throngs 
 and in receiving personal and political homage in the 
 towns and cities we were to pass through. But when 
 all this was over, and I found myself with him in the 
 wilderness of the Park, with only the superintendent 
 and a few attendants to help take up his tremendous 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 37 
 
 personal impact, how was it likely to fare with a non- 
 strenuous person like myself, I asked ? I had visions 
 of snow six and seven feet deep where traveling could 
 be done only upon snowshoes, and I had never had the 
 things on my feet in my life. If the infernal fires be- 
 neath, that keep the pot boiling so out there, should 
 melt the snows, I could see the party tearing along 
 on horseback at a wolf-hunt pace over a rough coun- 
 try; and as I had not been on a horse's back since the 
 President was born, how would it be likely to fare with 
 me there ? 
 
 I had known the President several years before he 
 became famous, and we had had some correspond- 
 ence on subjects of natural history. His interest in such 
 themes is always very fresh and keen, and the main 
 motive of his visit to the Park at this time was to see 
 and study in its semi-domesticated condition the great 
 game which he had so often hunted during his ranch 
 days; and he was kind enough to think it would be an 
 additional pleasure to see it with a nature-lover like 
 myself. For my own part, I knew nothing about big 
 game, but I knew there was no man in the country 
 with whom I should so like to see it as Roosevelt. 
 
 Some of our newspapers reported that the Presi- 
 dent intended to hunt in the Park. A woman in Ver- 
 mont wrote me, to protest against the hunting, and 
 hoped I would teach the President to love the animals 
 as much as I did, — as if he did not love them much 
 more, because his love is founded upon knowledge, 
 and because they had been a part of his life. She did 
 not know that I svas then cherishing the secret hope 
 that I might be allowed to shoot a cougar or bobcat; 
 but this fun did not come to me. The President said, 
 
38 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 "I will not fire a gun in the Park; then I shall have 
 no explanations to make." Yet once I did hear him 
 say in the wilderness, " I feel as if I ought to keep the 
 camp in meat. I always have.'* I regretted that he 
 could not do so on this occasion. 
 
 I have never been disturbed by the President's 
 hunting trips. It is to such men as he that the big 
 game legitimately belongs, — men who regard it from 
 the point of view of the naturalist as well as from that 
 of the sportsman, who are interested in its preserva- 
 tion, and who share with the world the delight they 
 experience in the chase. Such a hunter as Roosevelt 
 is as far removed from the game-butcher as day is 
 from night; and as for his killing of the "varmints," 
 
 — bears, cougars, and bobcats, — the fewer of these 
 there are, the better for the useful and beautiful game. 
 
 The cougars, or mountain lions, in the Park cer- 
 tainly needed killing. The superintendent reported 
 that he had seen where thev had slain nineteen elk, 
 and we saw where they had killed a deer, and dragged 
 its body across the trail. Of course, the President 
 would not now on his hunting trips shoot an elk or a 
 deer except to "keep the camp in meat," and for this 
 purpose it is as legitimate as to slay a sheep or a steer 
 for the table at home. 
 
 We left Washington on April 1, and strung several 
 of the larger Western cities on our thread of travel, 
 
 — Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, St. Paul, jNIinne- 
 apolis, — as well as many lesser towns, in each of 
 which the President made an address, sometimes 
 brief, on a few occasions of an hour or more. 
 
 He gave himself very freely and heartily to the peo- 
 ple wherever he went. He could easily match theii 
 
THE YELLOWSTONE RIVER AND CANYON. 
 
 From stereograph, copyright 1904, by Underwood & Underwood, New York. 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 39 
 
 Western cordiality and good-fellowship. Wherever 
 }iis train stopped, crowds soon gathered, or had al- 
 ready gathered, to welcome him. His advent made 
 a, holiday in each town he visited. At all the principal 
 stops the usual programme was: first, his reception 
 by the committee of citizens appointed to receive him, 
 
 — they usually boarded his private car, and were one 
 by one introduced to him; then a drive through the 
 town with a concourse of carriages; then to the hall 
 or open air platform, where he spoke to the assembled 
 throng; then to lunch or dinner; and then back to the 
 train, and off for the next stop — a round of hand- 
 shaking, carriage-driving, speech-making each day. 
 He usually spoke from eight to ten times every tw^enty- 
 four hours, sometimes for only a few minutes from 
 the rear platform of his private car, at others for an 
 hour or more in some large hall. In Chicago, Mil- 
 waukee, and St. Paul, elaborate banquets were given 
 him and his party, and on each occasion he delivered 
 a carefully prepared speech upon questions that in- 
 volved the policy of his administration. The throng 
 that greeted him in the vast Auditorium in Chicago 
 
 — that rose and waved and waved again — was one 
 of the grandest human spectacles I ever witnessed. 
 
 In Milwaukee the dense cloud of tobacco smoke 
 that presently filled the large hall after the feasting 
 was over was enough to choke any speaker, but it did 
 not seem to choke the President, though he does not 
 use tobacco in anv form himself; nor was there any- 
 thing foggy about his utterances on that occasion upon 
 legislative control of the trusts. 
 
 In St. Paul the city w^as inundated w^ith humanity, 
 
 — a vast human tide that left the middle of the streets 
 
40 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 bare as our line of carriages moved slowly along, but 
 that rose up in solid walls of town and prairie human- 
 ity on the sidewalks and city dooryards. How hearty 
 and happy the myriad faces looked! At one point I 
 spied in the throng on the curbstone a large silk ban- 
 ner that bore my own name as the title of some so- 
 ciety. I presently saw that it was borne by half a dozen 
 anxious and expectant-looking schoolgirls with braids 
 down their backs. As my carriage drew near them, 
 they pressed their way through the throng, and threw 
 a large bouquet of flowers into my lap. I think it would 
 be hard to say who blushed the deeper, the girls or 
 myself. It was the first time I had ever had flowers 
 showered upon me in public; and then, maybe, I felt 
 that on such an occasion I was only a minor side issue, 
 and public recognition was not called for. But the 
 incident pleased the President. "I saw that banner 
 and those flowers," he said afterwards; "and I was 
 delighted to see you honored that way." But I fear 
 I have not to this day thanked the Monroe School of 
 St. Paul for that pretty attention. 
 
 The time of the passing of the presidential train 
 seemed well known, even on the Dakota prairies. At 
 one point I remember a little brown schoolhouse stood 
 not far off, and near the track the schoolma'am, with 
 her flock, drawn up in line. We were at luncheon, but 
 the President caught a glimpse ahead through the win- 
 dow, and quickly took in the situation. With napkin 
 in hand, he rushed out on the platform and waved to 
 them. "Those children," he said, as he came back, 
 "wanted to see the President of the United States, 
 and I could not disappoint them. They may never 
 have another chance. What a deep impression such 
 things make when we are young ! " 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 41 
 
 At some point in the Dakotas we picked up the 
 former foreman of his ranch, and another cowboy 
 friend of the old davs, and they rode with the Presi- 
 dent in his private car for several hours. He was as 
 happy with them as a schoolboy ever was in meeting 
 old chums. He beamed with delight all over. The life 
 which those men represented, and of which he had 
 himself once formed a part, meant so much to him; 
 it had entered into the very marrow of his being, and 
 I could see the joy of it all shining in his face as he sat 
 and lived parts of it over again with those men that 
 day. He bubbled with laughter continually. The 
 men, I thought, seemed a little embarrassed by his 
 open-handed cordiality and good-fellowship. He him- 
 self evidently wanted to forget the present, and to live 
 only in the memory of those wonderful ranch days, — • 
 that free, hardy, adventurous life upon the plains. It 
 all came back to him with a rush when he found him- 
 self alone with these heroes of the rope and the stirrup. 
 How much more keen his appreciation was, and how 
 much quicker his memory, than theirs! He was con- 
 stantly recalling to their minds incidents which they 
 had forgotten, and the names of horses and dogs which 
 had escaped them. His subsequent life, instead of 
 making dim the memory of his ranch days, seemed 
 to have made it more vivid bv contrast. 
 
 When they had gone, I said to him, " I think ycur 
 affection for those men very beautiful." 
 
 "How could I help it?" he said. 
 
 "Still, few men in your station could or would go 
 back and renew such friendships." 
 
 " Then I pity them," he replied. 
 
 He said afterwards that his ranch life had been the 
 
42 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 making of him. It had built him up and hardened 
 him physically, and it had opened his eyes to the wealth 
 of manly character among the plainsmen and cattle- 
 men. 
 
 Had he not gone West, he said, he neyer would have 
 raised the Rough Riders Regiment; and had he not 
 raised that regiment and gone to the Cuban War, he 
 would not haye been made governor of New York; 
 and had not this happened, the pohticians would not 
 unwittingly have made his rise to the Presidency so 
 inevitable. There is no doubt, I think, that he would 
 have got there some day; but without the chain of 
 events above outlined, his rise could not have been so 
 rapid. 
 
 Our train entered the Bad Lands of North Dakota 
 in the early evening twilight, and the President stood 
 on the rear platform of his car, gazing wistfully upon 
 the scene. "I know all this country like a book," he 
 said. "I have ridden over it, and hunted over it, and 
 tramped over it, in all seasons and weather, and it looks 
 like home to me. My old ranch is not far off. We shall 
 soon reach Medora, which was my station." It was 
 plain to see that that strange, forbidding-looking land- 
 scape, hills and valleys to Eastern eyes utterly demoral- 
 ized and gone to the bad, — flayed, fantastic, treeless, 
 a riot of naked clay slopes, chimney-like buttes, and 
 dry coulees, — was in his eyes a land of almost pa- 
 thetic interest. There were streaks of good pasturage 
 here and there where his cattle used to graze, and where 
 the deer and the pronghorn used to linger. 
 
 When we reached Medora, where the train was 
 scheduled to stop an hour, it was nearly dark, but the 
 whole town and country round had turned out to wel- 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 43 
 
 come their old townsman. After much hand-shaking, 
 the committee conducted us down to a Httle hall, where 
 the President stood on a low platform, and made a 
 short address to the standing crowd that filled the 
 place. Then some flashlight pictures were taken by 
 the local photographer, after which the President 
 stepped down, and, while the people filed past him, 
 shook hands with every man, woman, and child of 
 them, calling many of them by name, and greeting 
 them all most cordially. I recall one grizzled old fron- 
 tiersman whose hand he grasped, calling him by name, 
 and saying, "How well I remember you! You once 
 mended my gunlock for me, — put on a new hammer.'* 
 -Yes," said the delighted old fellow; "I'm the man, 
 Mr. President." He was among his old neighbors 
 once more, and the pleasure of the meeting was very 
 obvious on both sides. I heard one of the women tell 
 him they were going to have a dance presently, and 
 ask him if he would not stay and open it! The Pre- 
 sident laughingly excused himself, and said his train 
 had to leave on schedule time, and his time was 
 nearly up. I thought of the incident in his "Ranch 
 Life," in which he says he once opened a cowboy ball 
 with the wife of a Minnesota man, who had recently 
 shot a bullying Scotchman who danced opposite. He 
 says the scene reminded him of the ball where Bret 
 Harte's heroine " went down the middle with the man 
 that shot Sandy Magee." 
 
 Before reaching Medora he had told me many an- 
 ecdotes of " Roaring Bill Jones," and had said I should 
 see him. But it turned out that Roaring Bill had be- 
 gun to celebrate the coming of the President too early 
 in the dav, and when w^e reached Medora he was not 
 
44 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 in a presentable condition. I forget now how he hac 
 earned his name, but no doubt he had come honestly 
 bv it ; it was a part of his history, as was that of " The 
 Pike," "Cold Turkey Bill," "Hash Knife Joe," and 
 other classic heroes of the frontier. 
 
 It is curious how certain things go to the bad in the 
 Far West, or a certain proportion of them, — bad 
 lands, bad horses, and bad men. And it is a degree 
 of badness that the East has no conception of, — land 
 that looks as raw and unnatural as if time had never 
 laid its shaping and softening hand upon it; horses 
 that, when mounted, put their heads to the ground 
 and their heels in the air, and, squealing defiantly, re- 
 sort to the most diabolically ingenious tricks to shake 
 off or to kill their riders; and men who amuse them- 
 selves in bar-rooms bv shootins; about the feet of a 
 "tenderfoot" to make him dance, or who ride along 
 the street and shoot at every one in sight. Just as the 
 old plutonic fires come to the surface out there in the 
 Rockies, and hint very strongly of the infernal regions, 
 so a kind of satanic element in men and animals — 
 an underlying devilishness — crops out, and we have 
 the border ruffian and the bucking broncho. 
 
 The President told of an Englishman on a hunting 
 trip in the West, who, being an expert horseman at 
 home, scorned the idea that he could not ride any of 
 their "grass-fed ponies." So they gave him a bucking 
 broncho. He was soon lying on the ground, much 
 stunned. When he could speak, he said, "I should 
 not have minded him, you know, hut 'e 'ides 'is 'cad.'' 
 
 At one place in Dakota the train stopped to take 
 w^ater while we were at lunch. A crowd soon gathered, 
 and the President went out to greet them. We could 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 45 
 
 hear his voice, and the cheers and laughter of the 
 crowd. And then we heard him say, "Well, good-by, 
 I must go now." Still he did not come. Then we heard 
 more talking and laughing, and another "good-by,'* 
 and yet he did not come. Then I went out to see what 
 had happened. I found the President down on the 
 ground shaking hands with the whole lot of them. 
 Some one had reached up to shake his hand as he 
 Tvas about withdrawing, and this had been followed by 
 such eagerness on the part of the rest of the people 
 to do likewise, that the President had instantly got 
 down to gratify them. Had the secret service men 
 known it, they would have been in a pickle. We prob- 
 ably have never had a President who responded more 
 freely and heartily to the popular liking for him than 
 Roosevelt. The crowd always seem to be in love with 
 him the moment they see him and hear his voice. And 
 it is not by reason of any arts of eloquence, or charm 
 of address, but by reason of his inborn heartiness and 
 sincerity, and his genuine manliness. The people feel 
 his quality at once. In Bermuda last winter I met a 
 Catholic priest who had sat on the platform at some 
 place in New England very near the President while 
 he was speaking, and who said, "The man had not 
 spoken three minutes before I loved him, and had 
 any one tried to molest him, I could have torn him to 
 pieces." It is the quality in the man that instantly in- 
 spires such a liking as this in strangers that will, I am 
 sure, safeguard him in all public places. 
 
 I once heard him say that he did not like to be ad- 
 dressed as "His Excellency;" he added laughingly, 
 "They might just as well call me His Transparency, 
 for all I care." It is this transparency, this direct, 
 
46 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 out-and-out, unequivocal character of him that is one 
 source of his popularity. The people do love trans- 
 parency, — all of them but the politicians. 
 
 A friend of his one day took him to task for some 
 mistake he had made in one of his appointments. " My 
 dear sir," replied the President, " where you know of 
 one mistake I have made, I know of ten." How such 
 candor must make the politicians shiver! 
 
 I have said that I stood in dread of the necessity of 
 snowshoeing in the Park, and, in lieu of that, of horse- 
 back riding. Yet when we reached Gardiner, the en- 
 trance to the Park, on that bright, crisp April morning, 
 with no snow in sight save that on the mountain-tops, 
 and found Major Pitcher and Captain Chittenden at 
 the head of a squad of soldiers, with a fine saddler 
 horse for the President, and an ambulance drawn by 
 two span of mules for me, I confess that I experienced 
 just a slight shade of mortification. I thought they 
 might have given me the option of the saddle or the 
 ambulance. Yet I entered the vehicle as if it was just 
 what I had been expecting. 
 
 The President and his escort, with a cloud of cow- 
 boys hovering in the rear, were soon off at a lively 
 pace, and my ambulance followed close, and at a lively 
 pace, too; so lively that I soon found myself gripping 
 the seat with my hands. "Well," I said to myself, 
 "they are giving me a regular Western send-ofi^;" and 
 I thought, as the ambulance swayed from side to side, 
 that it would suit me just as well if my driver did not 
 try to keep up with the presidential procession. The 
 driver and his mules were shut off from me by a cur- 
 tain, but, looking ahead out of the sides of the vehicle, 
 I saw two good-sized logs lying across our course. 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 47 
 
 Surely, I thought (and barely had time to think), he 
 will avoid these. But he did not, and as we passed over 
 them I was nearly thrown through the top of the 
 ambulance. "This is a lively send-off," I said, rub- 
 bing my bruises with one ha?nd, while I clung to the 
 seat with the other. Presently I saw the cowboys 
 scrambling up the bank as if to get out of our way; 
 then the President on his fine gray stallion scrambling 
 up the bank with his escort, and looking ominously 
 in m}' direction, as we thundered by. 
 
 "Well," I said, "this is indeed a novel ride; for 
 once in my life I have sidetracked the President of 
 the United States! I am given the right of way over 
 all." On we tore, along the smooth, hard road, and 
 did not slacken our pace till, at the end of a mile or 
 two, we began to mount the hill toward Fort Yellow- 
 stone. And not till we reached the fort did I learn that 
 our mules had run away. They had been excited 
 beyond control by the presidential cavalcade, and the 
 driver, finding he could not hold them, had aimed 
 only to keep them in the road, and we very soon had 
 the road all to ourselves. 
 
 Fort Yellowstone is at Mammoth Hot Springs, where 
 one gets his first view of the characteristic scenery of 
 the Park, — huge, boihng springs with their columns 
 of vapor, and the first characteristic odors which sug- 
 gest the traditional infernal regions quite as much as 
 the boiling and steaming water does. One also gets a 
 taste of a much more rarefied air than he has been used 
 to, and finds himself panting for breath on a very 
 slight exertion. The Mammoth Hot Springs have built 
 themselves up an enormous mound that stands there 
 above the village on the side of the mountain, terraced 
 
48 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 and scalloped and fluted, and suggesting some vitreous 
 formation, or rare carving of enormous, many-colored 
 precious stones. It looks quite unearthly, and, though 
 the devil's frying pan, and ink pot, and the Stygian 
 caves are not far off, the suggestion is of something 
 celestial rather than of the nether regions, — a vision 
 of jasper walls, and of amethyst battlements. 
 
 With Captain Chittenden I climbed to the top, step- 
 ping over the rills and creeks of steaming hot water, 
 and looked at the marvelously clear, cerulean, but 
 boihng, pools on the summit. The water seemed as 
 unearthly in its beauty and purity as the gigantic 
 sculpturing that held it. 
 
 The Stygian caves are still farther up the mountain, 
 ■ — little pockets in the rocks, or well-holes in the ground 
 at your feet, filled with deadly carbon dioxide. We 
 saw birds' feathers and quills in all of them. The 
 birds hop into them, probably in quest of food or 
 seeking shelter, and they never come out. We saw the 
 body of a martin on the bank of one hole. Into one 
 we sank a lighted torch, and it was extinguished as 
 quickly as if we had dropped it into water. Each cave 
 or niche is a death valley on a small scale. Near by 
 we came upon a steaming pool, or lakelet, of an acre 
 or more in extent. A pair of mallard ducks were swim- 
 ming about in one end of it, — the cool end. When we 
 approached, they swam slowly over into the warmer 
 water. As they progressed, the w^ater got hotter and 
 hotter, and the ducks' discomfort was evident. Pre- 
 sently they stopped, and turned toward us, half appeal- 
 ingly, as I thought. They could go no farther; would 
 we please come no nearer ? As I took another step or 
 two, up they rose and disappeared over the hill. Had 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 49 
 
 they gone to the extreme end of the pool, we could 
 have had boiled mallard for dinner. 
 
 Another novel spectacle was at night, or near sun- 
 down, when the deer came down from the hills into 
 the streets, and ate hay a few yards from the officers' 
 quarters, as unconcernedly as so many domestic sheep. 
 This they had been doing all winter, and they kept it 
 up till May, at times a score or more of them profiting 
 thus on the government's bounty. When the sundown 
 gun was fired a couple of hundred yards away, they 
 gave a nervous start, but kept on with their feeding. 
 The antelope and elk and mountain sheep had not 
 yet grown bold enough to accept Uncle Sam's charity 
 in that way. 
 
 The President wanted all the freedom and solitude 
 possible while in the Park, so all newspaper men and 
 other strangers were excluded. Even the secret service 
 men and his physician and private secretaries were 
 left at Gardiner. He craved once more to be alone with 
 nature; he was evidently hungry for the wild and the 
 aboriginal, — a hunger that seems to come upon him 
 regularly at least once a year, and drives him forth on 
 his hunting trips for big game in the West. 
 
 We spent two weeks in the Park, and had fail 
 weather, bright, crisp days, and clear, freezing nights. 
 The first week we occupied three camps that had been 
 prepared, or partly prepared, for us in the northeast 
 corner of the Park, in the region drained by the 
 Gardiner River, where there was but little snow, and 
 which we reached on horseback. 
 
 The second week we visited the geyser region, 
 which lies a thousand feet or more higher, and where 
 the snow was still five or six feet deep. This part of 
 
50 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 the journey was made in big sleighs, each drawn by 
 two span of horses. 
 
 On the horseback excursion, which involved only 
 about fifty miles of riding, we had a mule pack train, 
 and Sibley tents and stoves, with quite a retinue of 
 camp laborers, a lieutenant and an orderly or two, 
 and a guide, Billv Hofer. 
 
 The first camp was in a wild, rocky, and picturesque 
 gorge on the Yellowstone, about ten miles from the 
 fort. A slight indisposition, the result of luxurious 
 living, with no wood to chop or to saw, and no hills to 
 climb, as at home, prevented me from joining the party 
 till the third day. Then Captain Chittenden drove 
 me eight miles in a buggy. About two miles from camp 
 we came to a picket of two or three soldiers, where my 
 big bay was in waiting for me. I mounted him confi- 
 dently, and, guided by an orderly, took the narrow, 
 winding trail toward camp. Except for an hour's 
 riding the day before with Captain Chittenden, I had 
 not been on a horse's back for nearly fifty years, and 
 I had not spent as much as a day in the saddle during 
 my youth. That first sense of a live, spirited, powerful 
 animal beneath you, at whose mercv you are, — you, 
 a pedestrian all your days, — with gullies and rocks 
 and logs to cross, and deep chasms opening close 
 beside you, is not a little disturbing. But my big bay 
 did his part well, and I did not lose my head or my 
 nerve, as we cautiously made our way along: the nar^ 
 row path on the side of the steep gorge, with a foaming 
 torrent rushing along at its foot, nor yet when we forded 
 the rocky and rapid Yellowstone. A misstep or a 
 stumble on the part of my steed, and probably the first 
 bubble of my confidence would have been shivered at 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 51 
 
 once; but this did not happen, and in due time we 
 reached the group of tents that formed the President's 
 camp. 
 
 The situation was deh'ghtful, — no snow, scattered 
 pine trees, a secluded valley, rocky heights, and the 
 clear, ample, trouty waters of the Yellowstone. The 
 President was not in camp. In the morning he had 
 stated his wish to go alone into the wilderness. Major 
 Pitcher very naturally did not quite like the idea, and 
 wished to send an orderly with him. 
 
 "No," said the President. "Put me up a lunch, 
 and let me go alone. I will surely come back." 
 
 And back he surely came. It was about five o'clock 
 when he came briskly down the path from the east 
 to the camp. It came out that he had tramped about 
 eighteen miles through a very rough country. The day 
 before, he and the major had located a band of sev- 
 eral hundred elk on a broad, treeless hillside, and his 
 purpose was to find those elk, and creep up on them, 
 and eat his lunch under their very noses. And this he 
 did, spending an hour or more within fifty yards of 
 them. He came back looking as fresh as when he 
 started, and at night, sitting before the big camp fire, 
 related his adventure, and talked with his usual em- 
 phasis and copiousness of many things. He told me 
 of the birds he had seen or heard ; among them he had 
 heard one that was new to him. From his description 
 I told him I thought it was Townsend's solitaire, a 
 bird I much wanted to see and hear. I had heard the 
 West India solitaire, — one of the most impressive 
 songsters I ever heard, — and I wished to compare our 
 Western form with it. 
 
 The next morning we set out for our second camp. 
 
52 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 ten or a dozen miles away, and in reaching it passed 
 over much of the ground the President had traversed 
 the day before. As we came to a wild, rocky place 
 above a deep chasm of the river, with a few scattered 
 pine trees, the President said, "It was right here thai 
 I heard that strange bird song." We paused a moment. 
 "And there it is now," he exclaimed. 
 
 Sure enough, there was the solitaire singing from 
 the top of a small cedar, — a bright, animated, eloquent 
 song, but without the richness and magic of the song 
 of the tropical species. We hitched our horses, and 
 followed the bird up as it flew from tree to tree. The 
 President was as eager to see and hear it as I was. It 
 seemed very shy, and we only caught glimpses of it. 
 In form and color it much resembles its West India 
 cousin, and suggests our catbird. It ceased to sing 
 when we pursued it. It is a bird found only in the 
 wilder and higher parts of the Rockies. My impression 
 was that its song did not quite merit the encomiums 
 that have been pronounced upon it. 
 
 At this point, I saw amid the rocks my first and 
 only Rocky Mountain woodchucks, and, soon after 
 we had resumed our journey, our first blue grouse, — 
 a number of them like larger partridges. Occasionally 
 we would come upon black-tailed deer, standing or 
 lying down in the bushes, their large ears at attention 
 being the first thing to catch the eye. They would 
 often allow us to pass within a few rods of them with- 
 out showing alarm. Elk horns were scattered all over 
 this part of the Park, and we passed several old car- 
 casses of dead elk that had probably died a natural 
 death. 
 
 In a grassy bottom at the foot of a steep hill, while 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 53 
 
 the President and I were dismounted, and noting the 
 pleasing picture which our pack train of fifteen or 
 l^^enty mules made filing along the side of a steep 
 grassy slope, — a picture which he has preserved in 
 his late volume, " Out-Door Pastimes of an American 
 
 I Hunter," — our attention was attracted by plaintive, 
 musical, bird-like chirps that rose from the grass 
 about us. I was almost certain it was made by a bird; 
 the President was of like opinion ; and I kicked about 
 in the tufts of grass, hoping to flush the bir(5. Now 
 here, now there, arose this sharp, but bird-like note. 
 Finally we found that it was made by a species of 
 gopher, whose holes we soon discovered. What its 
 specific name is I do not know, but it should be called 
 the singing gopher. 
 
 Our destination this day was a camp on Cotton- 
 wood Creek, near " Hell Roaring Creek." As we made 
 our way in the afternoon along a broad, open, grassy 
 valley, I saw a horseman come galloping over the hill 
 to our right, starting up a band of elk as he came; riding 
 across the plain, he wheeled his horse, and, with the 
 military salute, joined our party. He proved to be a 
 government scout, called the "Duke of Hell Roar- 
 ing," — an educated officer from the Austrian army 
 who, for some unknown reason, had exiled himself 
 here in this out-of-the-way part of the world. He was 
 a man in his prime, of fine, military look and bearing. 
 After conversing a few moments with the President 
 and Major Pitcher, he rode rapidly away. 
 
 i Our second camp, which we reached in mid-after- 
 noon, was in the edge of the woods on the banks of a 
 fine, large trout stream, where ice and snow still lin- 
 gered in patches. I tried for trout in the head of a 
 
54 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDExNT 
 
 large, partly open pool, but did not get a rise; too much 
 ice in the stream, I concluded. Very soon my attention 
 was attracted by a strange note, or call, in the spruce 
 woods. The President had also noticed it, and, with 
 me, wondered what made it. Was it bird or beast? 
 Billy Hofer said he thought it was an owl, but it in no 
 way suggested an owl, and the sun was shining brightly. 
 It was a sound such as a boy might make by blowing 
 in the neck of an empty bottle. Presently we heard 
 it beyond us on the other side of the creek, which was 
 pretty good proof that the creature had wings. 
 
 "Let's go run that bird down," said the President 
 to me. 
 
 So off we started across a small, open, snow-streaked 
 plain, toward the woods beyond it. We soon decided 
 that the bird was on the top of one of a group of tall 
 spruces. After much skipping about over logs and 
 rocks, and much craning of our necks, we made him 
 out on the peak of a spruce. I imitated his call, when 
 he turned his head down toward us, but we could not 
 make out what he was. 
 
 " W'hy did we not think to bring the glasses ? " said 
 the President. 
 
 "I will run and get them," I replied. 
 
 "No," said he, "you stay here and keep that bird 
 treed, and I will fetch them." 
 
 So off he went like a boy, and was very soon back 
 with the glasses. W^e quickly made out that it was 
 indeed an owl, — the pigmy owl, as it turned out, — 
 not much larger than a bluebird. I think the Presi- 
 dent was as pleased as if we had bagged some big 
 game. He had never seen the bird before. 
 
 Throughout the trip I found his interest in bird life 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 55 
 
 very keen, and his eye and ear remarkably quick He 
 usually saw the bird or heard its note as quickly as I 
 did, — and I had nothing else to think about, and 
 had been teaching my eye and ear the trick of it for 
 over fifty years. Of course, his training as a big-game 
 hunter stood him in good stead, but back of that were 
 his naturalist's instincts, and his genuine love of all 
 forms of wild life. 
 
 I have been told that his ambition up to the time 
 he went to Harvard had been to be a naturalist, but 
 that there they seem to have convinced him that all 
 the out-of-door worlds of natural historv had be^n 
 conquered, and that the only worlds remaining were 
 in the laboratory, and to be won with the microscope 
 land the scalpel. But Roosevelt was a man made for 
 action in a wide field, and laboratory conquests could 
 not satisfy him. His instincts as a naturalist, how- 
 ever, lie back of all his hunting expeditions, and, in a 
 larger measure, I think, prompt them. Certain it is 
 that his hunting records contain more live natural 
 history than any similar records known to me, unless 
 it be those of Charles St. John, the Scotch naturalist- 
 Siportsman. 
 
 The Canada jays, or camp-robbers, as they are 
 often called, soon found out our camp that afternoon, 
 and no sooner had the cook begun to throw out peel- 
 ings and scraps and crusts than the jays began to carry 
 them off, not to eat, as I observed, but to hide them 
 in the thicker branches of the spruce trees. How tame 
 they were, coming within three or four yards of one! 
 Why this species of jay should everywhere be so fa- 
 miliar, and all other kinds so wild, is a puzzle. 
 
 In the morning, as we rode down the valley toward 
 
56 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 our next camping-place, at Tower Falls, a band of 
 elk containing a hundred or more started along the 
 side of the hill a few hundred yards away. I was some 
 distance behind the rest of the party, a.= usual, when 
 I saw the President wheel his horse off to the left, and, 
 beckoning to me to follow, start at a tearing pace on 
 the trail of the fleeing elk. He afterw^ards told me 
 that he wanted me to get a good view of those elk at 
 close range, and he was afraid that if he sent the major 
 or Hofer to lead me, I would not get it. I hurried along 
 as fast as I could, which was not fast; the w^ay was 
 rough, — logs, rocks, spring runs, and a tenderfoot 
 rider. 
 
 Now and then the President, looking back and see- 
 ing what slow progress I was making, would beckon 
 to me impatiently, and I could fancy him saying, " If 
 I had a rope around him, he would come faster than 
 that!" Once or twice I lost sight of both him and the 
 elk; the altitude was great, and the horse was laboring 
 like a steam-engine on an upgrade. Still I urged him 
 on. Presently, as I broke over a hill, I saw the Presi- 
 dent pressing the elk up the opposite slope. At the 
 brow of the hill he stopped, and I soon joined him. 
 There on the top, not fifty yards away, stood the elk 
 in a mass, their heads toward us and their tongues 
 hanging out. They could run no farther. The Presi- 
 dent laughed like a boy. The spectacle meant much 
 more to him than it did to me. I had never seen a wild 
 elk till on this trip, but they had been among the not- 
 able game that he had hunted. He had traveled hun- 
 dreds of miles, and undergone great hardships, to get 
 within rifle range of these creatures. Now here stood 
 scores of them, with lolling tongues, begging for mercy. 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 57 
 
 After gazing at them to our hearts' content, we 
 turned away to look up our companions, who were 
 nowhere within sight. We finally spied them a mile 
 or more away, and, joining them, all made our way 
 to an elevated plateau that commanded an open land- 
 scape three or four miles across. It was high noon, 
 and the sun shone clear and warm. From this lookout 
 we saw herds upon herds of. elk scattered over the 
 slopes and gentle valleys in front of us. Some were 
 grazing, some were standing or lying upon the ground, 
 or upon the patches of snow. Through our glasses we 
 counted the separate bands, and then the numbers 
 of some of the bands or groups, and estimated that 
 three thousand elk were in full view in the landscape 
 around us. It was a notable spectacle. Afterward, 
 in Montana, I attended a council of Indian chiefs at 
 one of the Indian agencies, and told them, through 
 their interpreter, that I had been with the Great Chief 
 in the Park, and of the game we had seen. When I 
 told them of these three thousand elk all in view at 
 once, they grunted loudly, whether with satisfaction 
 or with incredulitv, I could not tell. 
 
 In the midst of this great game amphitheatre we 
 dismounted and enjoyed the prospect. And the Pre- 
 sident did an unusual thing, he loafed for nearly an 
 hour, — stretched himself out in the sunshine upon 
 a flat rock, as did the rest of us, and, I hope, got a 
 few winks of sleep. I am sure I did. Little, slender, 
 striped chipmunks, about half the size of ours, were 
 scurrying about; but I recall no other wild thing save 
 the elk. 
 
 From here we rode down the valley to our third 
 camp, at Tower Falls, stopping on the way to eat our 
 
58 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 luncheon on a washed boulder beside a creek. On 
 this ride I saw my first and only badger; he^stuck his 
 striped head out of his hole in the ground only a few 
 yards away from us as we passed. 
 
 Our camp at Tower Falls was amid the spruces 
 above a canon of the Yellowstone, five or six hundred 
 feet deep. It was a beautiful and impressive situation, 
 — shelter, snugness, even cosiness, looking over the 
 brink of the awful and the terrifying. With a run and 
 a jump I think one might have landed in the river at 
 the bottom of the great abyss, and in doing so might 
 have scaled one of those natural obelisks or needles 
 of rock that stand up out of the depths two or three 
 hundred feet high. Nature shows you what an enor- 
 mous furrow her plough can open through the strata 
 when moving horizontally, at the same time that she 
 shows you what delicate and graceful columns her 
 slower and gentler aerial forces can carve out of the 
 piled strata. At the Falls there were two or three of 
 these columns, like the picket-pins of the elder gods. 
 
 Across the caiion in front of our camp, upon a grassy 
 plateau which was faced by a wall of trap rock, ap- 
 parently thirty or forty feet high, a band of moun- 
 tain sheep soon attracted our attention. They were 
 within long rifle range, but were not at all disturbed by 
 our presence, nor had they been disturbed by the road- 
 builders who, under Captain Chittenden, were con- 
 structing a government road along the brink of the 
 canon. We speculated as to whether or not the sheep 
 could get down the almost perpendicular face of the 
 chasm to the river to drink. It seemed to me impos- 
 sible. Would thev trv it while we were there to see ? 
 We all hoped so; and sure enough, late in the after- 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 59 
 
 noon the word came to our tents that the sheep were 
 coming down. The President, with coat off and a 
 towel around his neck, was shaving. One side of his 
 face was half shaved, and the other side lathered. 
 Hofer and I started for a point on the brink of the 
 canon where we could have a better view. 
 
 "I must see that," said the President. "The shav- 
 ing can wait, and the sheep won't=" 
 
 So on he came, accoutred as he was, — coatless, 
 hatless, but not latherless, nor towelless. Like the 
 rest of us, his only thought was to see those sheep. 
 With glasses in hand, we watched them descend those 
 perilous heights, leaping from point to point, finding a 
 foothold where none appeared to our eyes, loosening 
 fragments of the crumbling rocks as they came, now 
 poised upon some narrow shelf and preparing for the 
 next leap, zig-zagging or plunging straight down till 
 the bottom was reached, and not one accident or mis- 
 step amid all that insecure footing. I think the Presi- 
 dent was the most pleased of us all; he laughed with 
 the delight of it, and quite forgot his need of a hat 
 and coat till I sent for them. 
 
 In the night we heard the sheep going back; we 
 could tell by the noise of the falling ^tones. In the 
 morning I confidently expected to see some of them 
 lying dead at the foot of the cliffs, but there they all 
 were at the top once more, apparently safe and sound. 
 They do, how^ever, occasionally meet with accidents 
 in their perilous climbing, and their dead bodies have 
 been found at the foot of the rocks. Doubtless some 
 point of rock to which they had trusted gave way, and 
 crushed them in the descent, or fell upon those in the 
 lead. 
 
60 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 The next dav, while the rest of us went fishing for 
 trout in the Yellowstone, three or four miles above 
 camp, over the roughest trail that we had yet traversed 
 on horseback, the President, who never fishes unless 
 put to it for meat, went oft' alone again with his lunch 
 in his pocket, to stalk those sheep as he had stalked 
 the elk, and to feel the old sportsman's thrill without 
 the use of firearms. To do this involved a tramp of 
 eight or ten miles down the river to a bridge and up 
 the opposite bank. This he did, and ate his lunch near 
 the sheep, and was back in camp before we were. 
 
 We took some large cut-throat trout, as they are 
 called, from the yellow mark across their throats, and 
 I saw at short range a black-tailed deer bounding 
 along in that curious, stiff-legged, mechanical, yet 
 springy manner, apparently all four legs in the air at 
 once, and all four feet reaching the ground at once, 
 affording a very singular spectacle. 
 
 We spent two nights in our Tower Falls camp, and 
 on the morning of the third day set out on our return 
 to Fort Yellowstone, pausing at Yancey's on out way, 
 and exchanging greetings with the old frontiersman, 
 who died a few weeks later. 
 
 While in camp we always had a big fire at night in 
 the open near the tents, and around this we sat upon 
 logs or camp-stools, and listened to the President's 
 talk. What a stream of it he poured forth! and what 
 a varied and picturesque stream ! — anecdote, history, 
 science, politics, adventure, literature; bits of his 
 experience as a ranchman, hunter, Rough Rider, 
 legislator. Civil Service commissioner, police commis- 
 sioner, governor, president, — the frankest confes- 
 sions, the most telling criticisms, happy characteriza- 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT Gl 
 
 tlons of prominent political leaders, or foreign rulers, 
 or members of his own Cabinet; always surprising by 
 his candor, astonishing by his memory, and divertino- 
 by his humor. His reading has been very wide, and he 
 has that rare type of memory which retains details as 
 well as mass and generalities. One night something 
 started him off on ancient history, and one would have 
 thought he was just fresh from his college course in 
 history, the dates and names and events came so 
 readily. Another time he discussed palaeontology, and 
 rapidly gave the outlines of the science, and the main 
 facts, as if he had been reading up on the subject that 
 very day. He sees things as wholes, and hence the 
 relation of the parts comes easy to him. 
 
 At dinner, at the White House, the night before we 
 started on the expedition, I heard him talking with a 
 guest, — an officer of the British army, who was just 
 back from India. And the extent and variety of his 
 information about India and Indian history and the 
 relations of the British government to it were extraor- 
 dinary. It put the British major on his mettle to keep 
 pace with him. 
 
 One night in camp he told us the story of one of his 
 Rough Riders who had just written him from some 
 place in Arizona. The Rough Riders, wherever they 
 are now, look to him in time of trouble. This one had 
 come to grief in Arizona. He was in jail. So he wrote 
 the President, and his letter ran something like this : — 
 
 " Dear Colonel, — I am in trouble. I shot a lady 
 in the eye, but I did not intend to hit the lady; I was 
 shooting at my wife." 
 
 And the presidential laughter rang out over the 
 treetops. To another Rough Rider, who was in jaii. 
 
62 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 accused of horse stealing, he had loaned two hundred 
 dollars to pay counsel on his trial, and, to his surprise, 
 in due time the money came back. The Ex-Rough 
 wrote that his trial never came off. " We elected our 
 district attorney:'' and the laughter again sounded, 
 and drowned the noise of the brook near by. 
 
 On another occasion we asked the President if he 
 was ever molested by any of the "bad men" of the 
 frontier, with whom he had often come in contact. 
 "Onlv once," he said. The cowbovs had always 
 
 C/' 
 
 treated him with the utmost courtesy, both on the 
 round-up and in camp ; " and the few real desperadoes 
 I have seen were also perfectly polite." Once only 
 was he maliciously shot at, and then not by a cowboy 
 nor a bona fide *' bad man," but by a ** broad-hatted 
 ruffian of a cheap and commonplace type." He had 
 been compelled to pass the night at a little frontier 
 hotel where the bar-room occupied the whole lower 
 floor, and was, in consequence, the only place where 
 the guests of the hotel, whether drunk or sober, could 
 sit. As he entered the room, he saw that evers^ man 
 there was being terrorized by a half-drunken ruffian 
 who stood in the middle of the floor with a revolver 
 in each hand, compelling different ones to treat. 
 
 "I went and sat down behind the stove," said the 
 President, "as far from him as I could get; and hoped 
 to escape his notice. The fact that I wore glasses, 
 together w^ith my evident desire to avoid a fight, 
 apparently gave him the impression that I could be 
 imposed upon w^ith impunity. He very soon ap- 
 proached me, flourishing his two guns, and ordered 
 me to treat. I made no reply for some moments, when 
 the fellow became so threatening that I saw something 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 63 
 
 had to be done. The crowd, mostly sheep-herders and 
 small grangers, sat or stood back against the wall, 
 afraid to move. I was unarmed, and thought rapidly. 
 Saying, ' Well, if I must, I must,' I got up as if to walk 
 around him to the bar, then, as I got opposite him, I 
 wheeled and fetched him as heavy a blow on the chin- 
 point as I could strike. He went down like a steer 
 before the axe, firing both guns into the ceiling as he 
 went. I jumped on him, and, with my knees on his 
 chest, disarmed him in a hurry. The crowd was then 
 ready enough to help me, and we hog-tied him and put 
 him in an outhouse." The President alludes to this 
 incident in his "Ranch Life," but does not give the 
 details. It brings out his mettle very distinctly. 
 
 He told us in an amused way of the attempts of his 
 political opponents at Albany, during his early career 
 as a member of the ^Assembly, to besmirch his char- 
 acter. His outspoken criticisms and denunciations 
 had become intolerable to them, so they laid a trap 
 for him, but he was not caught. His innate rectitude 
 and instinct for the right course saved him, as it has 
 saved him many times since. I do not think that in any 
 emergency he has to debate with himself long as to 
 the right course to be pursued; he divines it by a kind 
 of infallible instinct. His motives are so simple and 
 direct that he finds a straight and easy course where 
 another man, whose eye is less single, would flounder 
 and hesitate. 
 
 The President unites in himself powers and qualities 
 that rarelv go together. Thus, he has both physical 
 and moral courage in a degree rare in history. He can 
 stand calm and unflinching in the path of a charging 
 grizzly, and he can confront with equal coolness and 
 
64 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 determination the predaceous corporations and mone}^ 
 powers of the country. 
 
 He unites the quahties of the man of action with 
 those of the scholar and WTiter, — another very rare 
 combination. He unites the instincts and accom- 
 phshments of the best breeding and culture with the 
 broadest democratic sympathies and affiliations. He is 
 as happy with a frontiersman like Seth Bullock as with 
 a fellow Harvard man, and Seth Bullock is happy, too. 
 
 He unites great austerity with great good-nature. 
 He unites great sensibility with great force and will 
 power. He loves solitude, and he loves to be in the 
 thick of the fight. His love of nature is equaled only 
 by his love of the ways and marts of men. 
 
 He is doubtless the most vital man on the continent, 
 if not on the planet, to-day. He is many-sided, and 
 every side throbs with his tremendous life and energy ; 
 the pressure is equal all around. His interests are as 
 keen in natural history as in economics, in literature 
 as in statecraft, in the young poet as in the old soldier, 
 in preserving peace as in preparing for w^ar. And he 
 can turn all his great power into the new channel on 
 the instant. His interest in the whole of life, and in the 
 whole life of the nation, never flags for a moment. 
 His activity is tireless. All the relaxation he needs 
 or craves is a change of work. He is like the farmer's 
 fields, that only need a rotation of crops. I once heard 
 him say that all he cared about being President was 
 just "the big work." 
 
 During this tour through the West, lasting over two 
 months, he made nearly three hundred speeches; and 
 yet on his return Mrs. Roosevelt told me he looked as 
 fresh and unworn as when he left home. 
 
SUNRISE IN YELLOWSTONE PARK. 
 
 From stereograph, copyright 1904, by Underwood & Underwood, New York. 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 65 
 
 We went up into the big geyser region with the big 
 sleighs, each drawn by four horses. A big snow-bank 
 had to be shoveled through for us before we got to the 
 Golden Gate, two miles above Mammoth Hot Springs, 
 Beyond that we were at an altitude of about eight 
 thousand feet, on a fairly level course that led now 
 through woods, and now through open country, with 
 the snow of a uniform depth of four or five feet, except 
 as we neared the "formations," where the subterranean 
 warmth kept the ground bare. The roads had been 
 broken and the snow packed for us by teams from the 
 fort, otherwise the journey would have been impossible. 
 
 The President always rode beside the driver. P>om 
 his youth, he said, this seat had always been the most 
 desirable one to him. When the sleigh would strike 
 the bare ground, and begin to drag heavily, he would 
 bound out nimbly and take to his heels, and then all 
 three of us — ]\Iajor Pitcher, Mr. Childs, and myself — ■ 
 would follow suit, sometimes reluctantly on my part. 
 Walking at that altitude is no fun, especially if you try 
 to keep pace with such a walker as the President is. 
 But he could not sit at his ease and let those horses 
 drag him in a sleigh over bare ground. When snow 
 was reached, we would again quickly resume our seats. 
 
 xAs one nears the geyser region, he gets the impression 
 from the columns of steam going up here and there 
 in the distance — now from behind a piece of woods, 
 now from out a hidden valley — that he is approaching 
 a manufacturing centre, or a railroad terminus. And 
 when he begins to hear the hoarse snoring of " Roaring 
 Mountain," the illusion is still more complete. At 
 Norris's there is a big vent where the steam comes 
 tearing out of a recent hole in the ground with terrific 
 
66 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 force. Huge mounds of ice had formed from the con- 
 gealed vapor all around it, some of them very striking. 
 
 The novelty of the geyser region soon wears off. 
 Steam and hot water are steam and hot water the 
 world over, and the exhibition of them here did not 
 differ, except in volume, from what one sees by his 
 own fireside. The "Growler" is only a boihng tea- 
 kettle on a large scale, and " Old Faithful " is as if the 
 lid were to fly off, and the whole contents of the kettle 
 should be thrown high into the air. To be sure, boiling 
 lakes and steaming rivers are not common, but the 
 new features seemed, somehow, out of place, and as 
 if nature had made a mistake. One disliked to see so 
 much good steam and hot water going to waste; whole 
 towns might be warmed by them, and big wheels made 
 to go round. I wondered that they had not piped them 
 into the big hotels which they opened for us, and which 
 were warmed by wood fires. 
 
 At Norris's the big room that the President and 
 I occupied was on the ground floor, and was heated 
 by a huge box stove. As we entered it to go to bed, 
 the President said, " Oom John, don't you think it 
 is too hot here ? " 
 
 " I certainly do," I replied. 
 
 "Shall I open the window?" 
 
 "That will just suit me." And he threw the sash, 
 which came down to the floor, all the way up, making 
 an opening like a doorway. The night was cold, but 
 neither of us suffered from the abundance of fresh 
 air. The caretaker of the building was a big Swede 
 called Andy. In the morning Andy said that beat 
 him: "There was the President of the United States 
 sleeping in that room, with the window open to the 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 67 
 
 floor, and not so much as one soldier outside on 
 guard." 
 
 The President had counted much on seeing the 
 bears that in summer board at the Fountain Hotel, 
 but they were not yet out of their dens. We saw the 
 track of only one, and he was not making for the hotel. 
 At all the formations where the geysers are, the ground 
 was bare over a large area. I even saw a wild flower — • 
 an early buttercup, not an inch high — in bloom. 
 This seems to be the earliest wild flower in the Rockies. 
 It is the only fragrant buttercup I know. 
 
 As we were riding along in our big sleigh toward 
 the Fountain Hotel, the President suddenly jumped 
 out, and, with his soft hat as a shield to his hand, 
 captured a mouse that was running along over the 
 ground near us. He wanted it for Dr. Merriam, on 
 the chance that it might be a new species. While we 
 all went fishing in the afternoon, the President skinned 
 his mouse, and prepared the pelt to be sent to Washing- 
 ton. It was done as neatly as a professed taxidermist 
 would have done it. This was the only game the 
 President killed in the Park. In relating the incident 
 to a reporter while I was in Spokane, the thought 
 occurred to me. Suppose he changes that u to an o, 
 and makes the President capture a moose, what a 
 predicament I shall be in! Is it anything more than 
 ordinary newspaper enterprise to turn a mouse into a 
 moose ? But, luckily for me, no such metamorphosis 
 happened to that little mouse. It turned out not to be 
 a new species, as it should have been, but a species 
 new to the Park. 
 
 I caught trout that afternoon, on the edge of steam- 
 ing pools in the Madison River, that seemed to my 
 
68 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 hand almost blood-warm. I suppose thev found bet- 
 ter feeding where the water was warm. On the table 
 they did not compare with our Eastern brook trout. 
 
 I was pleased to be told at one of the hotels that 
 thev had kalsomined some of the rooms with material 
 from one of the devil's paint-pots. It imparted a soft, 
 delicate, pinkish tint, not at all suggestive of things 
 Satanic. 
 
 One afternoon at Norris's, the President and I took 
 a walk to observe the birds. In the grove about the 
 barns there was a great number, the most attractive 
 to me being the mountain bluebird. These birds we 
 saw in all parts of the. Park, and at Norris's there was 
 an unusual number of them. How blue they were, — 
 breast and all. In voice and manner thev were almost 
 identical with our bluebird. The Western purple finch 
 was abundant here also, and juncos, and several kinds 
 of sparrows, with an occasional Western robin. A 
 pair of wild geese were feeding in the low, marshy 
 ground not over one hundred yards from us, but when 
 we tried to approach nearer they took wing. A few 
 geese and ducks seem to winter in the Park. 
 
 The second morning at Norris's, one of our team- 
 sters, George Marvin, suddenly dropped dead from 
 some heart affection, just as he had finished caring for 
 his team. It was a great shock to us all. I never saw 
 a better man with a team than he was. I had ridden 
 on the seat beside him all the day previous. On one 
 of the " formations " our teams had got mired in the 
 soft, putty-like mud, and at one time it looked as if 
 they could never extricate themselves, and I doubt 
 if they could have, had it not been for the skill with 
 which Marvin managed them. We started for the 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 60 
 
 Grand Canon up the Yellowstone that morning, and, 
 in order to give myself a walk over the crisp snow in 
 the clear, frosty air, I set out a little while in advance 
 of the teams. x\s I did so, I saw the President, accom- 
 panied by one of the teamsters, walking hurriedly 
 toward the barn to pay his last respects to the body 
 of Marvin. After we had returned to Mammoth Hot 
 Springs, he made inquiries for the young woman to 
 whom he had been told that Marvin was engaged to 
 be married. He looked her up, and sat a long time 
 with her in her home, offering his sympathy, and speak- 
 ing words of consolation. The act shows the depth 
 and breadth of his humanity. 
 
 At the Caiion Hotel the snow was very deep, and 
 had become so soft from the warmth of the earth be- 
 neath, as well as from the sun above, that we could 
 only reach the brink of the Canon on skis. The Presi- 
 dent and Major Pitcher had used skis before, but I 
 had not, and, starting out without the customary pole, 
 I soon came to grief. The snow gave way beneath 
 me, and I was soon in an awkward predicament. 
 The more I struggled, the lower my head and shoul- 
 ders went, till only my heels, strapped to those long 
 timbers, protruded above the snow. To reverse my 
 position was impossible till some one came, and reached 
 me the end of a pole, and pulled me upright. But I 
 very soon got the hang of the things, and the Presi- 
 dent and I quickly left the superintendent behind. 
 I think I could have passed the President, but my man- 
 ners forbade. He was heavier than I was, and broke 
 in more. When one of his feet would go down half a 
 yard or more, I noted with admiration the skilled 
 diplomacy he displayed in extricating it. The tend- 
 
70 CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 
 
 ency of my skis was all the time to diverge, and each 
 to go off at an acute angle to my main course, and I 
 had constantly to be on the alert to check this tend- 
 ency. 
 
 Paths had been shoveled for us along the brink of 
 the Canon, so that we got the usual views from the 
 different points. The Canon was nearly free from 
 snow, and was a grand spectacle, by far the grandest 
 to be seen in the Park. The President told us that 
 once, when pressed for meat, while returning through 
 here from one of his hunting trips, he had made his 
 way down to the river that we saw rushing along 
 beneath us, and had caught some trout for dinner. 
 Necessity alone could induce him to fish. 
 
 Across the head of the Falls there was a bridge of 
 snow and ice, upon which we were told that the coyotes 
 passed. As the season progressed, there would come 
 a day when the bridge would not be safe. It would 
 be interesting to know if the coyotes knew when this 
 time arrived. 
 
 The only live thing we saw in the Canon was an 
 osprey perched upon a rock opposite us. 
 
 Near the falls of the Yellowstone, as at other places 
 we had visited, a squad of soldiers had their winter 
 quarters. The President always called on them, looked 
 over the books they had to read, examined their house- 
 keeping arrangements, and conversed freely with 
 them. 
 
 In front of the hotel were some low hills separated 
 by gentle valleys. At the President's suggestion, he 
 and I raced on our skis down those inclines. We had 
 only to stand up straight, and let gravity do the rest. 
 As we were going swiftly down the side of one of the 
 
CAMPING WITH THE PRESIDENT 71 
 
 hills, I saw out of the corner of my eye the President 
 taking a header into the snow. The snow had given 
 way beneath him, and nothing could save him from 
 taking the plunge. I don't know whether I called out, 
 or only thought, something about the downfall of the 
 administration. At any rate, the administration was 
 down, and pretty well buried, but it was quickly on 
 its feet again, shaking off the snow with a boy's laugh- 
 ter. I kept straight on, and very soon the laugh was 
 on me, for the treacherous snow sank beneath me, 
 and I took a header, too. 
 
 " Who is laughing now, Oom John ? " called out the 
 President. 
 
 The spirit of the boy was in the air that day about 
 the Canon of the Yellowstone, and the biggest boy of 
 us all was President Roosevelt. 
 
 The snow was getting so soft in the middle of the day 
 that our return to the Mammoth Hot Springs could 
 no longer be delayed. Accordingly, we were up in 
 the morning, and ready to start on the home journey, 
 a distance of twenty miles, by four o'clock. The snow 
 bore up the horses well till mid-forenoon, when it be- 
 gan to give way beneath them. But by very careful 
 management we pulled through without serious delay, 
 and were back again at the house of Major Pitcher 
 in time for luncheon, being the only outsiders who 
 had ever made the tour of the Park so early in the sea- 
 son. 
 
 A few days later I bade good-by to the President, 
 who went on his wav to California, while I made a 
 loop of travel to Spokane, and around through Idaho 
 and Montana, and had glimpses of the great, optimis- 
 tic, sunshiny West that I shall not soon forget. 
 
A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 
 
 In 1868 a party of three of us set out for a brief 
 trouting excursion to a body of water called Thomas's 
 Lake, situated in the southern Catskills. On this ex- 
 cursion, more particularly than on any other I have 
 ever undertaken, I was taught how poor an Indian I 
 should make, and what a ridiculous figure a party 
 of men may cut in the woods when the way is uncer- 
 tain and the mountains high. 
 
 We left our team at a farmhouse near the head of 
 the Mill Brook, one June afternoon, and with knap- 
 sacks on our shoulders struck into the woods at the 
 base of the mountain, hoping to cross the range that 
 intervened between us and the lake bv sunset. We 
 engaged a good-natured but rather indolent young 
 man, who happened to be stopping at the house, and 
 who had carried a knapsack in the Union armies, to 
 pilot us a couple of miles into the woods so as to guard 
 against any mistakes at the outset. It seemed the easi- 
 est thinor in the w^orld to find the lake. The lav of the 
 land was so simple, according to accounts, that I fell 
 sure I could go to it in the dark. " Go up this little 
 brook to its source on the side of the mountain," they 
 said. "The vallev that contains the lake heads di- 
 rectlv on the other side." What could be easier! Bu 
 on a little further inquiry, they said we should " bea. 
 well to the left " when we reached the top of the moun- 
 tain. This opened the doors again; "bearing well to 
 the left" was an uncertain performance in strange 
 
A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 73 
 
 woods. We might bear so well to the left that it would 
 bring us ill. But why bear to the left at all, if the lake 
 was directly opposite? Well, not quite opposite; a 
 little to the left. There were two or three other val- 
 leys that headed in near there. We could easily find 
 the right one. But to make assurance doubly sure, 
 we engaged a guide, as stated, to give us a good start, 
 and go with us beyond the bearing-to-the-left point. 
 He had been to the lake the winter before and knew 
 the way. Our course, the first half hour, was along 
 an obscure wood-road which had been used for draw- 
 ing ash logs off the mountain in winter. There was 
 some hemlock, but more maple and birch. The woods 
 were dense and free from underbrush, the ascent 
 gradual. Most of the way we kept the voice of the 
 creek in our ear on the right. I approached it once, 
 and found it swarming with trout. The water was as 
 cold as one ever need wish. After a while the ascent 
 grew steeper, the creek became a mere rill that issued 
 from beneath loose, moss-covered rocks and stones, 
 and with much labor and puflSng we drew ourselves 
 up the rugged declivity. Every mountain has its steep- 
 est point, which is usually near the summit, in keeping, 
 I suppose, with the providence that makes the darkest 
 hour just before day. It is steep, steeper, steepest, 
 till you emerge on the smooth level or gently rounded 
 space at the top, which the old ice-gods polished off 
 so long ago. 
 
 We found this mountain had a hollow in its back 
 where the ground was soft and swampy. Some gi- 
 gantic ferns, which we passed through, came nearly 
 to our shoulders. We passed also several patches of 
 swamp honeysuckles, red with blossoms. 
 
74 A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 
 
 Our guide at length paused on a big rock where 
 the land began to dip down the other way, and con- 
 cluded that he had gone far enough, and that we 
 would now have no difficulty in finding the lake. " It 
 must lie right down there," he said, pointing with his 
 hand. But it was plain that he was not quite sure in 
 his own mind. He had several times wavered in his 
 course, and had shown considerable embarrassment 
 when bearing to the left across the summit. Still we 
 thought little of it. We w^ere full of confidence, and, 
 bidding him adieu, plunged down the mountain-side, 
 following a spring run that we had no doubt led to 
 the lake. 
 
 In these woods, w^hich had a southeastern expos- 
 ure, I first began to notice the wood thrush. In com- 
 ing up the other side I had not seen a feather of any 
 kind, or heard a note. Now the golden irilUde-de 
 of the wood thrush sounded through the silent woods. 
 While looking for a fish-pole about half way down the 
 mountain, I saw a thrush's nest in a little sapling 
 about ten feet from the ground. 
 
 After continuing our descent till our only guide, 
 the spring run, became quite a trout brook, and its 
 tiny murmur a loud brawl, we began to peer anx- 
 iously through the trees for a glimpse of the lake, or 
 for some conformation of the land that would indicate 
 its proximity. An object which w^e vaguely discerned 
 in looking under the near trees and over the more dis- 
 tant ones proved, on further inspection, to be a patch 
 of ploughed ground. Presently we made out a burnt 
 fallow near it. This was a wet blanket to our enthu- 
 siasm. No lake, no sport, no trout for supper that 
 night. The rather indolent young man had either 
 
A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 75 
 
 played us a trick, or, as seemed more likely, had missed 
 the way. We were particularly anxious to be at the 
 lake between sundown and dark, as at that time the 
 trout jump most freely. 
 
 Pushing on, we soon emerged into a stumpy field, 
 at the head of a steep valley, which swept around 
 toward the w^est. About two hundred rods below us 
 was a rude log house, with smoke issuing from the 
 chimney. A boy came out and moved toward the 
 spring with a pail in his hand. We shouted to him, 
 when he turned and ran back into the house without 
 pausing to reply. In a moment, the whole family hastily 
 rushed into the yard, and turned their faces toward us. 
 If we had come down their chimney, they could not 
 have seemed more astonished. Not making out what 
 they said, I went dow^n to the house, and learned to my 
 chagrin that we were still on the Mill Brook side, having 
 crossed only a spur of the mountain. We had not 
 borne sufficiently to the left, so that the main range, 
 which, at the point of crossing, suddenly breaks off 
 to the southeast, still intervened between us and the 
 lake. We were about five miles, as the water runs, 
 from the point of starting, and over two from the lake. 
 We must go directly back to the top of the range where 
 the guide had left us, and then, by keeping well to the 
 left, we would soon come to a line of marked trees, 
 which would lead us to the lake. So, turning upon our 
 trail, we doggedly began the work of undoing what we 
 had just done, — in all cases a disagreeable task, in 
 this case a very laborious one also. It w^as after sunset 
 when we turned back, and before we had got half way 
 up the mountain it began to be quite dark. We were 
 often obliged to rest our packs against trees and take 
 
76 A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 
 
 breath, which made our progress slow. Finally a halt 
 was called, beside an immense flat rock which had 
 paused in its slide down the mountain, and we prepared 
 to encamp for the night. A fire was built, the rock 
 cleared off, a small ration of bread served out, our 
 accotftrements hung up out of the way of the hedge- 
 hogs that were supposed to infest the locality and then 
 we disposed ourselves for sleep. If the owls or porcu- 
 pines (and I think I heard one of the latter in the mid- 
 dle of the night) reconnoitred our camp, they saw a 
 buffalo robe spread upon a rock, with three old felt 
 hats arranged on one side, and three pairs of sorry- 
 looking cowhide boots protruding from the other. 
 
 When we lay down, there was apparently not a 
 mosquito in the woods; but the "no-see-ems," as 
 Thoreau's Indian aptly named the midges, soon found 
 us out, and after the fire had gone down annoyed us 
 much. My hands and wrists suddenly began to smart 
 and itch in a most unaccountable manner. My first 
 thought was that they had been poisoned in some way. 
 Then the smarting extended to my neck and face, even 
 to my scalp, when I began to suspect what was the 
 matter. So, wrapping myself up more thoroughly, 
 and stowino^ my hands awav as best I could, I tried to 
 sleep, being some time behind my companions, who 
 appeared not to mind the "no-see-ems." I was further 
 annoyed by some little irregularity on my side of the 
 couch. The chambermaid had not beaten it up well. 
 One huge lump refused to be mollified, and each 
 attempt to adapt it to some natural hollow in my own 
 body brought only a moment's relief. But at last I 
 got the better of this also and slept. Late in the night 
 I woke up, just in time to hear a golden-crowned thrush 
 
IN THE WOODS 
 
A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 77 
 
 sing in a tree near by. It sang as loud and cheerily as 
 at midday, and I thought myself, after all, quite in luck. 
 Birds occasionally sing at night, just as the cock crows. 
 I have heard the hairbird, and the note of the kinirbird; 
 and the ruffed grouse frequently drums at night. 
 
 x\t the first faint signs of day a wood thrush sang, 
 a few rods below us. Then after a little delay, as the 
 gray light began to grow around, thrushes broke out 
 in full song in all parts of the woods. I thought I had 
 never before heard them sing so sweetly. Such a lei- 
 surely, golden chant ! — it consoled us for all we had 
 undergone. It was the first thing in order, — the 
 w^orms were safe till after this morning chorus. I judged 
 that the birds roosted but a few feet from the ground. 
 In fact, a bird in all cases roosts where it builds, and 
 the wood thrush occupies, as it were, the first story of 
 the woods. 
 
 There is something singular about the distribution 
 of the w^ood thrushes. At an earlier stage of my obser- 
 vations I should have been much surprised at finding 
 them in these woods. Indeed, I had stated in print on 
 two occasions that the wood thrush was not found in 
 the higher lands of the Catskills, but that the hermit 
 thrush and the veery, or Wilson's thrush, were common. 
 It turns out that this statement is only half true. The 
 w^ood thrush is found also, but is much more rare and 
 secluded in its habits than either of the others, being 
 seen only during the breeding season on remote moun- 
 tains, and then only on their eastern and southern 
 slopes. I have never yet in this region found the bird 
 spending the season in the near and familiar woods, 
 which is directly contrary to observations I have made 
 in other parts of the State. So different are the habits 
 of birds in different localities. 
 
78 A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 
 
 As soon as it was fairly light we were up and ready 
 to resume our march. A small bit of bread-and-butter 
 and a swallow or two of whiskey was all we had for 
 breakfast that morning. Our supply of each was very 
 limited, and we were anxious to save a little of both, 
 to relieve the diet of troUt to which we looked forward. 
 
 At an early hour we reached the rock where we had 
 parted with the guide, and looked around us into the 
 dense, trackless woods with many misgivings. To 
 strike out now on our own hook, where the way was 
 so blind and after the experience we had just had, 
 was a step not to be carelessly taken. The tops of these 
 mountains are so broad, and a short distance in the 
 woods seems so far, that one is bv no means master of 
 the situation after reaching the summit. And then 
 there are so many spurs and offshoots and changes of 
 direction, added to the impossibility of making any 
 generalization by the aid of the eye, that before one is 
 aware of it he is verv wide of his mark. 
 
 I remembered now that a young farmer of my ac- 
 quaintance had told me how he had made a long day's 
 march through the heart of this region, without path 
 or guide of any kind, and had hit his mark squarely. 
 He had been barkpeeling in Callikoon, — a famous 
 country for bark, — and, having got enough of it, he 
 desired to reach his home on Drv Brook without 
 making the usual circuitous journey between the two 
 places. To do this necessitated a march of ten or 
 twelve miles across several ranges of mountains and 
 through an unbroken forest, — a hazardous under- 
 taking in which no one would join him. Even the old 
 hunters who were familiar with the ground dissuaded 
 him and predicted the failure of his enterprise. But 
 
A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 79 
 
 having made up his mind, he possessed himself thor- 
 oughly of the topography of the country from the 
 aforesaid hunters, shouldered his axe, and set out, 
 holding a straight course through the woods, and 
 turning aside for neither swamps, streams, nor moun- 
 tains. When he paused to rest he would mark some 
 object ahead of him with his eye, in order that on get- 
 ting up again he might not deviate from his course. 
 His directors had told him of a hunter's cabin about 
 midw^ay on his route, which if he struck he might be 
 sure he w^as right. About noon this cabin was reached, 
 and at sunset he emerged at the head of Dry Brook. 
 
 After looking in vain for the line of marked trees, we 
 moved off to the left in a doubtful, hesitating manner, 
 keeping on the highest ground and blazing the trees as 
 we went. We were afraid to go down hill, lest we 
 should descend too soon; our vantage-ground was high 
 ground. A thick fog coming on, we were more bewil- 
 dered than ever. Still we pressed forward, climbing up 
 ledges and wading through ferns for about two hours, 
 when we paused by a spring that issued from beneath 
 an immense wall of rock that belted the highest part of 
 the mountain. There was quite a broad plateau here, 
 and the birch wood was very dense, and the trees of 
 unusual size. 
 
 After resting and exchanging opinions, we all con- 
 cluded that it was best not to continue our search 
 incumbered as we were; but we were not willing to 
 abandon it altogether, and I proposed to my com- 
 panions to leave them beside the spring w^ith our traps, 
 while I made one thorough and final effort to find the 
 lake. If I succeeded and desired them to come for- 
 ward, I was to fire my gun three times; if I failed and 
 
BO A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 
 
 wished to return, I would fire it twice, they of course 
 
 responding. 
 
 So, fiUing my canteen from the spring, I set out 
 again, taking the spring run for my guide. Before I 
 had followed it two hundred yards it sank into the 
 ground at my feet. I had half a mind to be supersti- 
 tious and to believe that we were under a spell, since 
 our guides played us such tricks. However, I deter- 
 mined to put the matter to a further test, and struck 
 out boldly to the left. This seemed to be the keyword, 
 — to the left, to the left. The fog had now^ lifted, so 
 that I could form a better idea of the lay of the land. 
 Twice I looked down the steep sides of the mountain, 
 sorely tempted to risk a plunge. Still I hesitated and 
 kept along on the brink. As I stood on a rock deliber- 
 ating, I heard a crackling of the brush, like the tread 
 of some large game, on a plateau below me. Suspecting 
 the truth of the case, I moved stealthily down, and 
 found a herd of young cattle leisurely browsing. We 
 had several times crossed their trail, and had seen that 
 morning a level, grassy place on the top of the moun- 
 tain, where they had passed the night. Instead of being 
 frightened, as I had expected, they seemed greatly 
 delighted, and gathered around me as if to inquire 
 the tidings from the outer world, — perhaps the quo- 
 tations of the cattle market. They came up to me, and 
 eagerly licked my hand, clothes, and gun. Salt was 
 what they were after, and they were ready to swallow 
 anything that contained the smallest percentage of it. 
 They were mostly yearlings and as sleek as moles. 
 They had a very gamy look. We were afterwards told 
 that, in the spring, the farmers round about turn into 
 these woods their young cattle, which do not come out 
 
A TRAMP IN THE CATSKII.LS 81 
 
 again till fall. They are then in good condition, — not 
 fat, like grass-fed cattle, but trim and supple, like deer. 
 Once a month the owner hunts them up and salts them. 
 Thev have their beats, and seldom wander beyond 
 well-defined limits. It was interesting to see them feed. 
 They browsed on the low limbs and bushes, and on the 
 various plants, munching at everything without any 
 apparent discrimination. 
 
 Thev attempted to follow me, but I escaped them 
 by clambering down some steep rocks. I now found 
 myself gradually edging down the side of the moun- 
 tain, keeping around it in a spiral manner, and scan- 
 ning the woods and the shape of the ground for some 
 encouraging hint or sign. Finally the w^oods became 
 more open, and the descent less rapid. The trees were 
 remarkably straight and uniform in size. Black birches, 
 the first I had seen, were very numerous. I felt encour- 
 aged. Listening attentively, I caught, from a breeze 
 just lifting the drooping leaves, a sound that I willingly 
 believed was made by a bullfrog. On this hint, I tore 
 dow^n through the woods at my highest speed. Then I 
 paused and listened again. This time there was no 
 mistaking it; it w^as the sound of frogs. Much elated, 
 I rushed on. By and by I could hear them as I ran. 
 Pthrung, pthrung, croaked the old ones; pug, pug, 
 shrilly joined in the smaller fry. 
 
 Then I caught, through the lower trees, a gleam 
 of blue, which I first thought was distant sky. A 
 second look and I knew it to be water, and in a moment 
 more I stepped from the woods and stood upon the 
 shore of the lake. I exulted silently. There it was at 
 last, sparkling in the morning sun, and as beautiful 
 as a dream. It was so good to come upon such open 
 
82 A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 
 
 space and such bright hues, after wandering in the 
 dim, dense woods! The eye is as dehghted as an 
 escaped bird, and darts gleefully from point to point. 
 
 The lake was a long oval, scarcely more than a mile 
 in circumference, with evenly wooded shores, which 
 rose gradually on all sides. After contemplating the 
 scene for a moment, I stepped back into the woods, 
 and, loading my gun as heavily as I dared, discharged it 
 three times. The reports seemed to fill all the moun- 
 tains with sound. The frogs quickly hushed, and I 
 listened for the response. But no response came. Then 
 I tried again and again, but without evoking an 
 answer. One of my companions, however, who had 
 climbed to the top of the high rocks in the rear of the 
 spring, thought he heard faintly one report. It seemed 
 an immense distance below him, and far around under 
 the mountain. I knew I had come a long way, and 
 hardly expected to be able to communicate with my 
 companions in the manner agreed upon. I therefore 
 started back, choosing my course without anv reference 
 to the circuitous route by which I had come, and load- 
 ing heavily and firing at intervals. I must have aroused 
 many long-dormant echoes from a Rip Van Winkle 
 sleep. As my powder got low, I fired and halloed alter- 
 nately, till I came near splitting both my throat and 
 gun. Finally, after I had begun to have a very ugly 
 feeling of alarm and disappointment, and to cast about 
 vaguely for some course to pursue in the emergency 
 that seemed near at hand, — namely, the loss of my 
 companions now I had found the lake, — a favoring 
 breeze brought me the last echo of a response. I 
 rejoined with spirit, and hastened with all speed in the 
 directiou whence the sound had come, but, after 
 
A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 83 
 
 repeated trials, failed to elicit another answering sound. 
 Th^s filled me with apprehension again. I feared that 
 my friends had been misled by the reverberations, 
 and I pictured them to myself hastening in the oppo- 
 site direction. Paying little attention to my course, 
 but paying dearly for my carelessness afterward, I 
 rushed forward to undeceive them. But they had not 
 been deceived, and in a few moments an answering 
 shout revealed them near at hand. I heard their 
 tramp, the bushes parted, and we three met again. 
 
 In answer to their eager inquiries, I assured them 
 that I had seen the lake, that it was at the foot of the 
 mountain, and that we could not miss it if w^e kept 
 straight down from where we then were. 
 
 My clothes were soaked with perspiration, but I 
 shouldered my knapsack with alacrity, and we began 
 the descent. I noticed that the woods were much 
 thicker, and had quite a different look from those I 
 had passed through, but thought nothing of it, as I 
 expected to strike the lake near its head, whereas I had 
 before come out at its foot. We had not gone far when 
 we crossed a line of marked trees, which my com- 
 panions were disposed to follow. It intersected our 
 course nearly at right angles, and kept along and up 
 the side of the mountain. My impression was that it 
 led up from the lake, and that by keeping bur own 
 course w^e should reach the lake sooner than if we fol- 
 lowed this line. 
 
 About half w^av dow^n the mountain, we could see 
 through the interstices the opposite slope. I encour- 
 aged my comrades by telling them that the lake was 
 betw^een us and that, and not more than half a mile 
 distant. We soon reached the bottom, where we found 
 
84 A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 
 
 a small stream and quite an extensive alder swamp, 
 evidently the ancient bed of a lake. I explained to my 
 half-vexed and half-incredulous companions that we 
 were probably above the lake, and that this stream 
 must lead to it. "Follow it," they said; "we will wait 
 here till we hear from you." 
 
 So I went on, more than ever disposed to believe 
 that we were under a spell, and that the lake had 
 slipped from my grasp after all. Seeing no favorable 
 sign as I went forward, I laid down my accoutrements, 
 and climbed a decaved beech that leaned out over the 
 swamp and promised a good view from the top. As I 
 stretched myself up to look around from the highest 
 attainable branch, there was suddenlv a loud crack 
 at the root. With a celeritv that would at least have 
 done credit to a bear, I regained the ground, having 
 caught but a momentary glimpse of the country, but 
 enough to convince me no lake was near. Leaving all 
 incumbrances here but my gun, I still pressed on, 
 loath to be thus baffled. After floundering through 
 another alder swamp for nearly half a mile, I flattered 
 myself that I was close on to the lake. I caught sight 
 of a low spur of the mountain sweeping around like a 
 half-extended arm, and I fondly imagined that within 
 its clasp was the object of my search. But I found only 
 more alder swamp. After this region was cleared, the 
 creek began to descend the mountain very rapidly. Its 
 banks became high and narrow, and it went whirling 
 awav with a sound that seemed to mv ears like a burst 
 of ironical laughter. I turned back with a feeling of 
 mingled disgust, shame, and vexation. In fact I was 
 almost sick, and when I reached my companions, after 
 an absence of nearly two hours, hungry, fatigued, and 
 
A TRAMP IN TIIi: CATSKILLS 
 
 85 
 
 disheartened, I would have sold my interest in Thomas's 
 Lake at a very low figure. For the first time, I heartily 
 wished myself well out of the woods. Thomas might 
 keep his lake, and the enchanters guard his possession ! 
 I doubted if he had ever found it the second time, or if 
 any one else ever had. 
 
 My companions, who were quite fresh, and who had 
 not felt the strain of baffled purpose as I had, assumed 
 a more encouraging tone. After I had rested a while, 
 and partaken sparingly of the bread and whiskey, 
 which in such an emergency — and only in such — is 
 a great improvement on bread and water, I agreed to 
 their proposition that we should make another attempt. 
 As if to reassure us, a robin sounded his cheery call 
 near by, and the winter wren, the first I had heard 
 in these woods, set his music-box going, which fairly 
 ran over with fine, gushing, lyrical sounds. There 
 can be no doubt but this bird is one of our finest 
 songsters. If it would only thrive and sing well when 
 caged, like the canary, how far it would surpass that 
 bird ! It has all the vivacity and versatility of the 
 canary, without any of its shrillness. Its song is indeed 
 a little cascade of melody. 
 
 We again retraced our steps, rolling the stone, as 
 it were, back up the mountain, determined to commit 
 ourselves to the line of marked trees. These we finally 
 reached, and, after exploring the country to the right, 
 saw that bearing to the left was still the order. The 
 trail led up over a gentle rise of ground, and in less 
 than twenty minutes we were in the woods I had passed 
 through when I found the lake. The error I had made 
 was then plain; we had come off the mountain a few 
 paces too far to the right, and so had passed down oi^ 
 
86 A TRAMP IX THE CATSKILLS 
 
 the wrong side of the ridge, into what we afterward 
 learned was the valley of xAlder Creek. 
 
 We now made good time, and before many minutes 
 I again saw the mimic sky glance through the trees. 
 As we approached the lake a solitary woodchuck, the 
 first wild animal we had seen since entering the woods, 
 sat crouched upon the root of a tree a few feet from the 
 water, apparently completely non-plussed by the unex- 
 pected appearance of danger on the land side. All 
 retreat was cut off, and he looked his fate in the face 
 without flinching. I slaughtered him just as a savage 
 would have done, and from the same motive, — I 
 wanted his carcass to eat. 
 
 The mid-afternoon sun was now shining upon the 
 lake, and a low, steady breeze drove the little waves 
 rocking to the shore. A herd of cattle were browsing 
 on the other side, and the bell of the leader sounded 
 across the water. In these solitudes its clang was wild 
 and musical. 
 
 To try the trout was the first thing in order. On a 
 rude raft of logs which we found moored at the shore, 
 and which with two aboard shipped about a foot of 
 water, we floated out and wet our first flv in Thomas's 
 Lake; but the trout refused to jump, and, to be frank, 
 not more than a dozen and a half were caught during 
 our stay. Only a week previous, a party of three had 
 taken in a few hours all the fish thev could carrv out 
 of the woods, and had nearly surfeited their neighbors 
 with trout. But from some cause thev now refused to 
 
 I.' 
 
 rise, or to touch any kind of bait : so we fell to catching 
 the sunfish, which were small but very abundant. 
 Their nests were all along shore. A space about the 
 size of a breakfast-plate was cleared of sediment and 
 
A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 87 
 
 decayed vegetable matter, revealing the pebbly bot- 
 tom, fresh and bright, with one or two fish suspended 
 over the centre of it, keeping watch and ward. If an 
 intruder approached, they would dart at him spitefully. 
 These fish have the air of bantam cocks, and, with their 
 sharp, prickly fins and spines and scaly sides, must be 
 ugly customers in a hand-to-hand encounter with other 
 finny warriors. To a hungry man they look about as 
 unpromising as hemlock slivers, so thorny and thin are 
 they; yet there is sweet meat in them, as we found that 
 day. 
 
 Much refreshed, I set out with the sun low in the 
 west to explore the outlet of the lake and try for trout 
 there, while my companions made further trials in 
 the lake itself. The outlet, as is usual in bodies of 
 water of this kind, was very gentle and private. The 
 stream, six or eight feet wide, flowed silently and 
 evenly along for a distance of three or four rods, 
 when it suddenly, as if conscious of its freedom, took 
 a leap down some rocks. Thence, as far as I fol- 
 lowed it, its descent was very rapid through a con- 
 tinuous succession of brief falls like so many steps 
 down the mountain. Its appearance promised more 
 trout than I found, though I returned to camp with 
 a very respectable string. 
 
 Toward sunset I went round to explore the inlet, 
 and found that as usual the stream wound leisurely 
 through marshy ground. The water being much colder 
 than in the outlet, the trout were more plentiful. As 
 I was picking my way over the miry ground and 
 through the rank growths, a ruffed grouse hopped 
 up on a fallen branch a few paces before me, and, jerk- 
 ing his tail, threatened to take flight. But as I was 
 
88 A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 
 
 at that moment gunless and remained stationary, he 
 presently jumped down and walked away. 
 
 A seeker of birds, and ever on the alert for some 
 new acquaintance, my attention was arrested, on first 
 entering the swamp, by a bright, lively song, or war- 
 ble, that issued from the branches overhead, and that 
 was entirelv new to me. though there was something 
 in the tone of it that told me the bird was related to 
 the wood-wagtail and to the water-wagtail or thrush. 
 The strain was emphatic and quite loud, like the ca- 
 nary's, but very brief. The bird kept itself well secreted ^ 
 in the upper branches of the trees, and for a long time 
 eluded my eye. I passed to and fro several times, and 
 it seemed to break out afresh as I approached a cer- 
 tain little bend in the creek, and to cease after I had 
 got beyond it; no doubt its nest was somewhere in the 
 vicinity. After some delay the bird was sighted and 
 brought down. It proved to be the small, or north- 
 ern, water-thrush (called also the New York water- 
 thrush), — a new bird to me. In size it was notice- 
 ably smaller than the large, or Louisiana, water-thrush, 
 as described by Audubon, but in other respects its 
 general appearance was the same. It was a great treat 
 to me, and again I felt myself in luck. 
 
 This bird was unknown to the older ornithologists, 
 and is but poorly described by the new. It builds a 
 mossy nest on the ground, or under the edge of a de- 
 caved log. A correspondent writes me that he has 
 found it breeding on the mountains in Pennsylvania. 
 The large-billed water-thrush is much the super ioi 
 songster, but the present species has a very bright 
 and cheerful strain. The specimen I saw, contrary 
 to the habits of the family, kept in the treetops like a 
 
A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 89 
 
 warbler, and seemed to be engaged in catching in- 
 sects. 
 
 The birds were unusually plentiful and noisy about 
 the head of this lake; robins, blue jays, and wood- 
 peckers greeted me with their familiar notes. The 
 blue jays found an owl or some wild animal a short 
 distance above me, and, as is their custom on such 
 occasions, proclaimed it at the top of their voices, and 
 kept on till the darkness began to gather in the woods. 
 
 I also heard here, as I had at two or three other 
 points in the course of the day, the peculiar, resonant 
 hammering of some species of woodpecker upon the 
 hard, dry limbs. It was unlike any sound of the kind 
 I had ever before heard, and, repeated at intervals 
 through the silent woods, was a very marked and char- 
 acteristic feature. Its peculiarity was the ordered suc- 
 cession of the raps, which gave it the character of a 
 premeditated performance. There were first three 
 strokes following each other rapidly, then two much 
 louder ones with longer intervals between them. I 
 heard the drumming here, and the next day at sun- 
 set at Furlow Lake, the source of Dry Brook, and in 
 no instance was the order varied. There was melody 
 in it, such as a woodpecker knows how to evoke from 
 a smooth, dry branch. It suggested something quite 
 IS pleasing as the liveliest bird-song, and was if any- 
 thing more woodsy and wild. As the yellow-bellied 
 woodpecker was the most abundant species in these 
 woods, I attributed it to him. It is the one sound that 
 still links itself with those scenes in my mind. 
 
 At sunset the grouse began to drum in all parts of 
 the woods about the lake. I could hear five at one 
 time, thump, thump, thump, thump, thr-r-r-r-r-r-rr. 
 
90 A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 
 
 It was a homely, welcome sound. As I returned to 
 camp at twilight, along the shore of the lake, the frogs 
 also were in full chorus. The older ones ripped out 
 their responses to each other with terrific force and 
 volume. I know of no other animal capable of giv- 
 ing forth so much sound, in proportion to its size, as 
 a frog. Some of these seemed to bellow as loud as a 
 two-year-old bull. They were of immense size, and 
 very abundant. No frog-eater had ever been there. 
 Near the shore we felled a tree which reached far out 
 in the lake. Upon the trunk and branches the frogs 
 had soon collected in large numbers, and gamboled 
 and splashed about the half-submerged top, like a 
 parcel of schoolboys, making nearly as much noise. 
 
 After dark, as I was frying the fish, a panful of the 
 largest trout was accidentally capsized in the fire. With 
 rueful countenances we contemplated the irreparable 
 loss our commissariat had sustained by this mishap; 
 but remembering there was virtue in ashes, we poked 
 the half-consumed fish from the bed of coals and ate 
 them, and they were good. 
 
 We lodged that night on a brush-heap and slept 
 soundly. The green, yielding beech-twigs, covered 
 with a buffalo robe, were equal to a hair mattress. 
 The heat and smoke from a large fire kindled in 
 the afternoon had banished every "no-see-em" from 
 the locality, and in the morning the sun was above the 
 mountain before we awoke. 
 
 I immediately started again for the inlet, and went 
 far up the stream toward its source. A fair string of 
 trout for breakfast was my reward. The cattle with 
 the bell were at the head of the valley, where they had 
 passed the night. Most of them were two-year-old 
 
A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 
 
 91 
 
 steers. They came up to me and begged for salt, 
 and scared the fish by their importunities. 
 
 We finished our bread that morning, and ate every 
 fish we could catch, and about ten o'clock prepared 
 to leave the lake. The weather had been admirable, 
 and the lake was a gem, and I would gladly have spent 
 a week in the neighborhood; but the question of sup- 
 plies was a serious one, and would brook no delay. 
 
 When we reached, on our return, the point where 
 we had crossed the line of marked trees the day be- 
 fore, the question arose whether we should still trust 
 ourselves to this line, or follow our own trail back to 
 the spring and the battlement of rocks on the top of 
 the mountain, and thence to the rock where the guide 
 had left us. We decided in favor of the former course. 
 After a march of three quarters of an hour the blazed 
 trees ceased, and we concluded we were near the point 
 at which we had parted with the guide. So we built 
 a fire, laid down our loads, and cast about on all sides 
 for some clew as to our exact locality. Nearly an hour 
 was consumed in this manner and without any result. 
 I came upon a brood of young grouse, which diverted 
 me for a moment. The old one blustered about at a 
 
 m 
 
 furious rate, trying to draw all attention to herself, 
 while the young ones, which were unable to fly, hid 
 themselves. She whined like a dog in great distress, 
 and dragged herself along apparently with the great- 
 est difficulty. As I pursued her, she ran very nimbly, 
 and presently flew a few yards. Then, as I went on, 
 she flew farther and farther each time, till at last she 
 got up, and went humming through the woods as if 
 she had no interest in them. I went back and caught 
 one of the young, which had simply squatted close to 
 
92 A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 
 
 the leaves. I took it up and set it on the palm of my 
 hand, which it hugged as closely as if still upon the 
 ground. I then put it in my coatsleeve, when it ran 
 and nestled in my armpit. 
 
 When we met at the sign of the smoke, opinions 
 differed as to the most feasible course. There was no 
 doubt but that we could get out of the woods; but we 
 wished to get out speedily, and as near as possible to 
 the point where we had entered. Half ashamed of our 
 timidity and indecision, we finally tramped away 
 back to where we had crossed the line of blazed trees, 
 followed our old trail to the spring on the top of the 
 range, and, after much searching and scouring to the 
 right and left, found ourselves at the very place we 
 had left two hours before. Another deliberation and 
 a divided council. But something must be done. It 
 was then mid-afternoon, and the prospect of spending 
 another night on the mountains, without food or drink, 
 was not pleasant. So we moved down the ridge. Here 
 another line of marked trees was found, the course 
 of which formed an obtuse angle with the one we had 
 followed. It kept on the top of the ridge for perhaps 
 a mile, when it entirely disappeared, and we were as 
 much adrift as ever. Then one of the party swore an 
 oath, and said he was going out of those woods, hit 
 or miss, and, wheeling to the right, instantly plunged 
 over the brink of the mountain. The rest followed, 
 but would fain have paused and ciphered away at 
 their own uncertainties, to see if a certaintv could not 
 be arrived at as to where we would come out. But 
 our bold leader was solving the problem in the right 
 way. Down and down and still down we went, as if 
 we were to bring up in the bowels of the earth. It was 
 
A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 93 
 
 by far the steepest descent we had made, and we felt a 
 grim satisfaction in knowing that we could not retrace 
 our steps this time, be the issue what it might. As 
 we paused on the brink of a ledge of rocks, we chanced 
 to see through the trees distant cleared land. A house 
 or barn also was dimly descried. This was encour- 
 aging; but we could not make out whether it was on 
 Beaver Kill or Mill Brook or Dry Brook, and did not 
 long stop to consider where it was. We at last brought 
 up at the bottom of a deep gorge, through which flowed 
 a rapid creek that literally swarmed with trout. But we 
 were in no mood to catch tbem, and pushed on along 
 the channel of the stream, sometimes leaping from 
 rock to rock, and sometimes splashing heedlessly 
 through the water, and speculating the while as to 
 where we should probably come out. On the Beaver 
 Kill, my companions thought; but, from the position 
 of the sun, I said, on the Mill Brook, about six mile^ 
 below our team; for I remembered having seen, in 
 coming up this stream, a deep, wild valley that led 
 up into the mountains, like this one. Soon the banks 
 of the stream became lower, and we moved into the 
 woods. Here we entered upon an obscure wood-road, 
 which presently conducted us into the midst of a vast 
 hemlock forest. The land had a gentle slope, and we 
 wondered why the lumbermen and barkmen who prowl 
 through these woods had left this fine tract untouched. 
 Beyond this the forest was mostlv birch and maple. 
 We were now close to the settlement, and began 
 to hear human sounds. One rod more, and we were 
 cut of the woods. It took us a moment to comprehend 
 the scene. Things looked very strange at first; but 
 quickly they began to change and to put on familiar 
 
94 A TRAMP IN THE CATSKILLS 
 
 features. Some magic scene-shifting seemed to take 
 place before my eyes, till, instead of the unknown set- 
 tlement which I at first seemed to look upon, there 
 stood the farmhouse at w^hich w^e had stopped two 
 days before, and at the same moment we heard the 
 stamping of our team in the barn. We sat down and 
 laughed heartily over our good luck. Our desperate 
 venture had resulted better than we had dared to hope, 
 and had shamed our wisest plans. At the house our 
 arrival had been anticipated about this time, and din- 
 ner was being put upon the table. 
 
 It was then five o'clock, so that we had been in the 
 woods just forty-eight hours; but if time is only phe- 
 nomenal, as the philosophers say, and life only in feel- 
 ing, as the poets aver, we were some months, if not 
 years, older at that moment than we had been two 
 days before. Yet younger, too, — though this be a 
 paradox, — for the birches had infused into us some 
 Di their ow^n suppleness and strength. 
 
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