In fact, the route I have
here traced is the same to-day as then. Even the rude camps are
located in the same places, with the exception that the trail has been
shortened over Tahawas, and a camp established on Skylight. With good
guides the route is not difficult for ladies in good health,--say
sufficient health to endure half a day's shopping. Persons
contemplating the mountain trip need blankets, a knapsack, and a
rubber cloth or overcoat; food can be procured at the hotels or farm
houses.

* * *

The old English ballads have all the sparkle, the
energy and the rhythm of our mountain streams, but
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Bunyan are the
crystal lakes from which flow the river, ay, the Hudson
of our language.

_Wallace Bruce_.

* * *

In this hasty sketch I have had little space to indulge in
picture-painting. I passed Bridal-Veil Fall without a reference. I
was tempted to loiter on the banks of the Feld-spar and the bright
Opalescent, but I passed by without even picking a pebble from the
clear basins of its sparkling cascades. I passed the "tear of the
clouds," four thousand feet above the tide--that fountain of the
Hudson nearest to the sky, without being beguiled into poetry. I have
not ventured upon a description of a sunrise view from the summit of
Tahawas, of the magic effect of light above clouds that clothe the
surrounding peaks in garments wrought, it seems, of softest wool,
until mist and vapor dissolve in roseate colors, and the landscape
lies before us like an open book, which many glad eyes have looked
upon again and again. I have left it for your guides to tell you, by
roaring camp-fires, long stories of adventure in trapping and hunting,
of wondrous fishes that grow longer and heavier every season, although
captured and broiled many and many a year ago--trout and pickerel
literally pickled in fiction, served and re-served in the piquant
sauce of mountain vocabulary. In brief, I have kept my imagination and
enthusiasm under strict control. But, after all, the Adirondacks are
a wonderland, and we, who dwell in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, are
happy in having this great park of Nature's making at our very doors.

It has charms alike for the hunter, the angler, the artist, the
writer, and the scientist. Let us rejoice, therefore, that the State
of New York is waking at last to the fact, that these northern
mountains were intended by nature to be som