four o'clock it began gently to rain. I think I heard the first drop
that fell. My companions were all in sound sleep. The rain
increased, and gradually the sleepers awoke. It was like the tread
of an advancing enemy which every ear had been expecting. The roof
over us was of the poorest, and we had no confidence in it. It was
made of the thin bark of spruce and balsam, and was full of hollows
and depressions. Presently these hollows got full of water, when
there was a simultaneous downpour of bigger and lesser rills upon
the sleepers beneath. Said sleepers, as one man, sprang up, each
taking his blanket with him; but by the time some of the party had
got themselves stowed away under the adjacent rock, the rain ceased.
It was little more than the dissolving of the nightcap of fog which
so often hangs about these heights. With the first appearance of the
dawn I had heard the new thrush in the scattered trees near the
hut,--a strain as fine as if blown upon a fairy flute, a suppressed
musical whisper from out the tops of the dark spruces. Probably
never did there go up from the top of a great mountain a smaller
song to greet the day, albeit it was of the purest harmony. It
seemed to have in a more marked degree the quality of interior
reverberation than any other thrush song I had ever heard. Would the
altitude or the situation account for its minor key? Loudness would
avail little in such a place. Sounds are not far heard on a
mountain-top; they are lost in the abyss of vacant air. But amid
these low, dense, dark spruces, which make a sort of canopied
privacy of every square rod of ground, what could be more in keeping
than this delicate musical whisper? It was but the soft hum of the
balsams, interpreted and embodied in a bird's voice.

It was the plan of two of our companions to go from Slide over into
the head of the Rondout, and thence out to the railroad at the
little village of Shokan, an unknown way to them, involving nearly
an all-day pull the first day through a pathless wilderness. We
ascended to the topmost floor of the tower, and from my knowledge of
the topography of the country I pointed out to them their course,
and where the valley of the Rondout must lie. The vast stretch of
woods, when it came into view from under the foot of Slide, seemed
from our point of view very uniform. It swept away to the southeast,
rising gently toward the ridge that separates Lone Mountain from
Peak-o'-Moose, and presented a