ed moss, that every
camper-out remembers. The fish are as black as the stream and very wild.
They dart from beneath the fringed rocks, or dive with the hook into
the dusky depths,--an integral part of the silence and the shadows. The
spell of the moss is over all. The fisherman's tread is noiseless, as
he leaps from stone to stone and from ledge to ledge along the bed of
the stream. How cool it is! He looks up the dark, silent defile, hears
the solitary voice of the water, sees the decayed trunks of fallen
trees bridging the stream, and all he has dreamed, when a boy, of the
haunts of beasts of prey--the crouching feline tribes, especially if it
be near nightfall and the gloom already deepening in the woods--comes
freshly to mind, and he presses on, wary and alert, and speaking to his
companions in low tones.

After an hour or so the trout became less abundant, and with nearly a
hundred of the black sprites in our baskets we turned back. Here and
there I saw the abandoned nests of the pigeons, sometimes half a dozen
in one tree. In a yellow birch which the floods had uprooted, a number
of nests were still in place, little shelves or platforms of twigs
loosely arranged, and affording little or no protection to the eggs or
the young birds against inclement weather.

Before we had reached our companions the rain set in again and forced
us to take shelter under a balsam. When it slackened we moved on and
soon came up with Aaron, who had caught his first trout, and,
considerably drenched, was making his way toward camp, which one of the
party had gone forward to build. After traveling less than a mile, we
saw a smoke struggling up through the dripping trees, and in a few
moments were all standing round a blazing fire. But the rain now
commenced again, and fairly poured down through the trees, rendering
the prospect of cooking and eating our supper there in the woods, and
of passing the night on the ground without tent or cover of any kind,
rather disheartening. We had been told of a bark shanty a couple of
miles farther down the creek, and thitherward we speedily took up our
line of march. When we were on the point of discontinuing the search,
thinking we had been misinformed or had passed it by, we came in sight
of a bark-peeling, in the midst of which a small log house lifted its
naked rafters toward the now breaking sky. It had neither floor nor
roof, and was less inviting on first sight than the open woods. But a
board