the tremulous starlight. And after her stole
the tall Oneida, rifle slanted across his naked shoulders, striding
silently at her stirrup as she rode. I had a momentary glimpse of their
shadowy shapes moving against the sky, then they were blotted out in
the gloom of the trees, leaving me in the road peering after them
through the darkness, until even the far stroke of the horse's feet
died out, and there was no sound in the black silence save the hushed
rushing of the stream hurrying through the shrouded hollow below.

Not a light glimmered in the settlement. The ungainly tavern, every
window sealed with solid shutters, sprawled at the cross-roads, a
strange, indistinct silhouette; the night-mist hung low over the fields
of half-charred stumps, and above the distant bed of the brook a band
of fog trailed, faintly luminous.

Never before had I so deeply felt the desolation of the northland. In a
wilderness there is nothing forbidding to me; its huge earth-bedded,
living pillars supporting the enormous canopy of green, its vastness,
its mystery, its calm silence, may awe yet nothing sadden. But a vague
foreboding enters when man enters. Where his corn grows amid the
cinders of primeval things, his wanton gashes on tree and land, his
beastly pollution of the wild, crystal waters, all the restlessness,
and barrenness, and filth, and sordid deformity he calls his
home--these sadden me unutterably.

I know, too, that Sir William Johnson felt as I do, loving the forest
for its own beautiful, noble sake; and the great Virginian, who cared
most for the majestic sylvan gardens planted by the Almighty, grieved
at destruction, and, even in the stress of anxiety, when his carpenters
and foresters were dealing pitilessly with the woods about West Point
in order to furnish timber for the redoubts and the floats for the
great chain, he thought to warn his engineers to beware of waste caused
by ignorance or wantonness.

Where rich and fertile soil is the reward for the desperate battle with
an iron forest, I can comprehend the clearing of a wilderness, and
admire the transformation into gentle hills clothed in green, meadows,
alder-bordered waters, acres of grain, and dainty young orchards; but
here, in this land, only the flats along the river-courses are worthy
of cultivation; the rest is sand and rock deeply covered with the
forest mast, and fertile only while that lasts. And the forest once
gone, land and water shrivel, unnouri