e smooth
strong back of the steed are alone visible. The peak to which I
refer is Slide Mountain, the highest of the Catskills by some two
hundred feet, and probably the most inaccessible; certainly the
hardest to get a view of, it is hedged about so completely by other
peaks,--the greatest mountain of them all, and apparently the least
willing to be seen; only at a distance of thirty or forty miles is
it seen to stand up above all other peaks. It takes its name from a
landslide which occurred many years ago down its steep northern
side, or down the neck of the grazing steed. The mane of spruce and
balsam fir was stripped away for many hundred feet, leaving a long
gray streak visible from afar.

Slide Mountain is the centre and the chief of the southern
Catskills. Streams flow from its base, and from the base of its
subordinates, to all points of the compass,--the Rondout and the
Neversink to the south; the Beaverkill to the west; the Esopus to
the north; and several lesser streams to the east. With its summit
as the centre, a radius of ten miles would include within the circle
described but very little cultivated land; only a few poor, wild
farms in some of the numerous valleys. The soil is poor, a mixture
of gravel and clay, and is subject to slides. It lies in the valleys
in ridges and small hillocks, as if dumped there from a huge cart.
The tops of the southern Catskills are all capped with a kind of
conglomerate, or "pudden stone,"--a rock of cemented quartz pebbles
which underlies the coal measures. This rock disintegrates under the
action of the elements, and the sand and gravel which result are
carried into the valleys and make up the most of the soil. From the
northern Catskills, so far as I know them, this rock has been swept
clean. Low down in the valleys the old red sandstone crops out,
and, as you go west into Delaware County, in many places it alone
remains and makes up most of the soil, all the superincumbent rock
having been carried away.

Slide Mountain had been a summons and a challenge to me for many
years. I had fished every stream that it nourished, and had camped
in the wilderness on all sides of it, and whenever I had caught a
glimpse of its summit I had promised myself to set foot there before
another season should pass. But the seasons came and went, and my
feet got no nimbler, and Slide Mountain no lower, until finally, one
July, seconded by an energetic friend, we thought to bring Slide to