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At five P. M. we found ourselves — Iglesias, a
party of friends, and myself — on board the Isaac
Newton, a great, ugly, three-tiered box that walks
the North River, like a laboratory of greasy odors.

In this stately cinder-mill were American citizens.
Not to discuss spitting, which is for spittoons, not
literature, our fellow-travellers on the deck of the
“floating palace” were passably endurable people
in looks, style, and language. I dodge discrimination,
and characterize them en masse by negations.
The passengers of the Isaac Newton, on a certain
evening of July, 18—, were not so intrusively
green and so gasping as Britons, not so ill-dressed
and pretentious as Gauls, not so ardently futile and
so lubberly as Germans. Such were the negative
virtues of our fellow-citizen travellers; and base
would it be to exhibit their positive vices.

And so no more of passengers or passage. I
will not describe our evening on the river. Alas
for the duty of straightforwardness and dramatic

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unity! Episodes seem so often sweeter than plots!
The wayside joys are better than the final successes;
the flowers along the vista, brighter than
the victor-wreaths at its close. I may not dally
on my way, turning to the right and the left for
beauty and caricature. I will balance on the strict
edge of my narrative, as a seventh-heavenward Mahometan,
with wine-forbidden steadiness of poise,
treads Al Seràt, his bridge of a sword-blade.

Next morning, at Albany, divergent trains cleft
our party into a better and a worser half. The
beautiful girls, our better half, fled westward to
ripen their pallid roses with richer summer-hues in
mosquitoless inland dells. Iglesias and I were still
northward bound.

At the Saratoga station we sipped a dreary, faded
reminiscence of former joys and sparkling brilliancy
long dead, in cups of Congress-water, brought by
unattractive Ganymedes and sold in the train, —
draughts flat, flabby, and utterly bubbleless, lukewarm
heel-taps with a flavor of savorless salt.

Still northward journeying, and feeling the seaside
moisture evaporate from our blood under inland
suns and sultry inland breezes, we came to
Lake Champlain.

As before banquets, to excite appetite, one takes
the gentle oyster, so we, before the serious pleasure
of our journey, tasted the Adirondack region, paradise
of Cockney sportsmen. There, through the
forest, the stag of ten trots, coquetting with greenhorns.
He likes the excitement of being shot at

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and missed. He enjoys the smell of powder in a
battle where he is always safe. He hears Greenhorn
blundering through the woods, stopping to
growl at briers, stopping to revive his courage
with the Dutch supplement. The stag of ten
awaits his foe in a glade. The foe arrives, sees the
antlered monarch, and is panic-struck. He watches
him prance and strike the ground with his hoofs.
He slowly recovers heart, takes a pull at his flask,
rests his gun upon a log, and begins to study his
mark. The stag will not stand still. Greenhorn
is baffled. At last his target turns and carefully
exposes that region of his body where Greenhorn
has read lies the heart. Just about to fire, he
catches the eye of the stag winking futility into his
elaborate aim. His blunderbuss jerks upward. A
shower of cut leaves floats through the smoke,
from a tree thirty feet overhead. Then, with a
mild-eyed melancholy look of reproachful contempt,
the stag turns away, and wanders off to sleep in
quiet coverts far within the wood. He has fled,
while for Greenhorn no trophy remains. Antlers
have nodded to the sportsman; a short tail has
disappeared before his eyes; — he has seen something,
but has nothing to show. Whereupon he
buys a couple of pairs of ancient weather-bleached
horns from some colonist, and, nailing them up at
impossible angles on the wall of his city den, humbugs
brother-Cockneys with tales of vénerie, and has
for life his special legend, “How I shot my first deer
in the Adirondacks.”

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The Adirondacks provide a compact, convenient,
accessible little wilderness, — an excellent field for
the experiments of tyros. When the tyro, whether
shot, fisherman, or forester, has proved himself
fully there, let him dislodge into some vaster
wilderness, away from guides by the day and
superintending hunters, away from the incursions
of the Cockney tribe, and let out the caged savage
within him for a tough struggle with Nature. It
needs a struggle tough and resolute to force that
Protean lady to observe at all her challenger.

It is well to go to the Adirondacks. They are
shaggy, and shagginess is a valuable trait. The
lakes are very well, — very well indeed. The objection
to the region is not the mountains, which
are reasonably shaggy, — not the lakes and rivers,
which are water, a capital element. The real difficulty
is the society: not the autochthonous society,—
they are worthy people, and it is hardly to be
mentioned as a fault that they are not a discriminating
race, and will asseverate that all fish are
trout, and the most arrant mutton is venison, —
but the immigrant, colonizing society. Cockneys
are to be found at every turn, flaunting their banners
of the awkward squad, proclaiming to the
world with protuberant pride that they are the
veritable backwoodsmen, — rather doing it, rather
astonishing the natives, they think. And so they
are. One squad of such neophytes might be entertaining;
but when every square mile echoes with
their hails, lost, poor babes, within a furlong of

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their camps, and when the woods become dim and
the air civic with their cooking-smokes, and the
subtile odor of fried pork overpowers methylic
fragrance among the trees, then he who loves
forests for their solitude leaves these brethren to
their clumsy joys, and wanders elsewhere deeper
into sylvan scenes.

Our visit to the Adirondacks was episodic; and
as I have forsworn episodes, I turn away from them
with this mild slander, and strike again our Maine
track. With lips impurpled by the earliest huckle-berries,
we came out again upon Champlain. We
crossed that water-logged valley in a steamboat,
and hastened on, through a pleasant interlude of
our rough journey, across Vermont and New Hampshire,
two States not without interest to their residents,
but of none to this narrative.

By coach and wagon, by highway and by-way,
by horse-power and steam-power, we proceeded,
until it chanced, one August afternoon, that we
left railways and their regions at a wayside station,
and let our lingering feet march us along the valley
of the Upper Connecticut. This lovely river, baptizer
of Iglesias's childhood, was here shallow and
musical, half river, half brook; it had passed the
tinkling period, and plashed and rumbled voicefully
over rock and shallow.

It was a fair and verdant valley where we walked,
overlooked by hills of pleasant pastoral slope. All
the land was gay and ripe with yellow harvest.
Strolling along, as if the business of travel were

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forgotten, we placidly identified ourselves with the
placid scenery. We became Arcadians both. Such
is Arcadia, if I have read aright: a realm where
sunshine never scorches, and yet shade is sweet;
where simple pleasures please; where the blue sky
and the bright water and the green fields satisfy
forever.

We were in lightest marching-trim. Iglesias
bore an umbrella, our armor against what heaven
could do with assault of sun or shower. I was
weaponed with a staff, should brute or biped uncourteous
dispute our way. We had no impediments
of “great trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and
bundle.” A thoughtful man hardly feels honest in
his life except as a pedestrian traveller. “La propri
été c'est le vol,” — which the West more briefly
expresses by calling baggage “plunder.” What
little plunder our indifferent honesty had packed
for this journey we had left with a certain stage-coachman,
perhaps to follow us, perhaps to become
his plunder. We were thus disconnected from
any depressing influence; we had no character to
sustain; we were heroes in disguise, and could
make our observations on life and manners without
being invited to a public hand-shaking, or to
exhibit feats in jugglery, for either of which a
traveller with plenteous portmanteaus, hair or
leather, must be prepared in villages thereabouts.
Totally unembarrassed, we lounged along or
leaped along, light-hearted. When the river neared
us, or winsome brooklet from the hill-side thwarted

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our path, we stooped and lapped from their pools
of coolness, or tasted that most ethereal tipple,
the mingled air and water of electric bubbles, as
they slid brightly toward our lips.

The angle of the sun's rays grew less and less,
the wheat-fields were tinged more golden by the
clinging beams, our shadows lengthened, as if
exercise of an afternoon were stimulating to such
unreal essences. Finally the blue dells and gorges
of a wooded mountain, for two hours our landmark,
rose between us and the sun. But the sun's Parthian
arrows gave him a splendid triumph, more
signal for its evanescence. A storm was inevitable,
and sunset prepared a reconciling pageant.

Now, as may be supposed, Iglesias has an eye
for a sunset. That summer's crop had been very
short, and he had been some time on starvation-allowance
of cloudy magnificence. We therefore
halted by the road-side, and while I committed the
glory to memory, Iglesias intrusted his distincter
memorial to a sketch-book.

We were both busy, he repeating forms, noting
shades and tints, and I studying without pictorial
intent, when we heard a hail in the road below our
bank. It was New Hampshire, near the Maine
line, and near the spot where nasal organs are fabricated
that twang the roughest.

“Say!” shrieked up to us a freckled native,
holding fast to the tail of a calf, the last of a gambolling
family he was driving, — “Say! whodger
doon up thurr? Layn aoot taoonshup lains naoou,

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aancher? Cauds ur suvvares raoond. Spekkleayshn
goan on, ur guess.”

We allowed this unmelodious vocalist to respect
us by permitting him to believe us surveyors in
another sense than as we were. One would not be
despised as an unpractical citizen, a mere looker
at Nature with no immediate view to profit, even
by a freckled calf-driver of the Upper Connecticut.
While we parleyed, the sketch was done, and the
pageant had faded quick before the storm.

Splendor had departed; the world in our neighborhood
had fallen into the unillumined dumps.
An ominous mournfulness, far sadder than the pensiveness
of twilight, drew over the sky. Clouds,
that donned brilliancy for the fond parting of mountain-tops
and the sun, now grew cheerless and
gray; their gay robes were taken from them, and
with bended heads they fled away from the sorrowful
wind. In western glooms beyond the world
a dreary gale had been born, and now came wailing
like one that for all his weariness may not rest, but
must go on harmful journeys and bear evil tidings.
With the vanguard gusts came volleys of rain, malicious
assaults, giving themselves the trouble to
tell us in an offensive way what we could discover
for ourselves, that a wetting impended and umbrellas
would soon be naught.

While the storm was thus nibbling before it bit,
we lengthened our strides to escape. Water, concentrated
in flow of stream or pause of lake, is
charming; not so to the shelterless is water diffused

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in dash of deluge. Water, when we choose our
method of contact, is a friend; when it masters
us, it is a foe; when it drowns us or ducks us, a
very exasperating foe. Proud pedestrians become
very humble personages, when thoroughly vanquished
by a ducking deluge. A wetting takes out
the starch not only from garments, but the wearers
of them. Iglesias and I did not wish to stand all
the evening steaming before a kitchen-fire, inspecting
meanwhile culinary details: Phillis in the kitchen
is not always as fresh as Phillis in the field.
We therefore shook ourselves into full speed, and
bolted into our inn at Colebrook; and the rain, like
a portcullis, dropped solid behind us.

In town, the landlord is utterly merged in his
hotel. He is a sovereign rarely apparent. In the
country, the landlord is a personality. He is
greater than the house he keeps. Men arriving
inspect the master of the inn narrowly. If his
first glance is at the pocket, cheer will be bad; if
at the eyes or the lips, you need not take a cigar
before supper to keep down your appetite.

Our landlord was of the latter type. He surged
out of the little box where he was dispensing not
too fragrant rummers to a circle of village-politicians,
and congratulated us on our arrival before
the storm. He was a discriminating person. He
detected us at once, saw we were not tramps or
footpads, and led us to the parlor, a room attractively
furnished with a map of the United States
and an oblong music-book open at “Old Hundred.”

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Our host further felicitated us that we had not
stopped at a certain tavern below, where, as he
said, —

“They cut a chunk er beef and drop 't into a
pot to bile, and bile her three days, and then don't
have noth'n' else for three weeks.”

He put his head out of the door and called, —

“George, go aoot and split up that 'ere wood as
fine as chaowder: these men 'll want their supper
right off.”

Drawing in his head, he continued to us confidentially, —

“That 'ere George is jes' like a bird: he goes
off at one snappin'.”

Our host then rolled out toward the bar-room, to
discuss with his cronies who we might be. From
the window we perceived the birdlike George fly
and alight near the specified wood, which he proceeded
to bechowder. He brought in the result
of his handiwork, as smiling as a basket of chips.
Neat-handed Phillis at the door received the chowder,
and by its aid excited a sound and a smell,
both prophetic of supper. And we, willing to repose
after a sixteen-mile afternoon-walk, lounged
upon sofa or tilted in rocking-chair, taking the
available mental food, namely, “Godey's Lady's
Book” and the Almanac.

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