wind and rain, and the huge trees shut around
us so closely that no eye could pierce a pistol-shot into their glades.
There were blue-jays all about us, making the woods ring with their
querulous cries, and a single fish-hawk screamed from the blue overhead,
as he sailed round and round, watching the chances of a supper in the
lake. Between us and the water's edge, and a little to one side of the
path we had bushed out to the shore, was the tent of the guides, and
there they lay asleep, except one who was rubbing up his "man's" rifle,
which had been forgotten the night before when we came in from the hunt,
and so had gathered rust.

Three of our party were sleeping, and the others talked quietly and low,
desultorily, as if the drowsiness had half conquered us too. The
conversation had rambled round from a discussion on the respective
merits of the Sharp's and the Kentucky rifles (consequent on a trial of
skill and rifles which we had had after dinner) to Spiritualism,--led to
this last topic by my relation of some singular experiences I had met in
the way of presentiments and what seemed almost like second-sight,
during a three-months' sojourn in the woods several summers before.
There is something wonderfully exciting to the imagination in the
wilderness, after the first impression of monotony and lonesomeness has
passed away and there comes the necessity to animate this so vacant
world with something. And so the pines lift themselves grimly against
the twilight sky, and the moanings of the woods become full of meaning
and mystery. Living, therefore, summer after summer, as I had done, in
the wilderness, until there is no place in the world which seems so much
like a home to me as a bark camp in the Adirondack, I had come to be
what most people would call morbid, but what I felt to be only sensitive
to the things around, which we never see, but to which we all at times
pay the deference of a tremor of inexplicable fear, a quicker and less
deeply drawn breath, an involuntary turning of the head to see something
which we know we shall not see, yet are glad to find that we do
not,--all which things we laugh at as childish when they have passed,
yet tremble at as readily when they come again. J., who was both poet
and philosopher, singularly clear and cold in his analyses, and at the
same time of so great imaginative power that he could set his creations
at work and then look on and reason out the law of their working as
t