Its eyes are large and fine, and its form slender. It looks like
only a far-off undegenerate cousin of the filthy creature that has
come to us from the long-peopled Old World. Some creature ran
between my feet and the fire toward morning, the last night we slept
in the woods, and I have little doubt it was one of these wood-rats.

The people in these back settlements are almost as shy and furtive
as the animals. Even the men look a little scared when you stop them
by your questions. The children dart behind their parents when you
look at them. As we sat on a bridge resting,--for our packs still
weighed fifteen or twenty pounds each,--two women passed us with
pails on their arms, going for blackberries. They filed by with
their eyes down like two abashed nuns.

[Illustration: SOME PEOPLE OF THE CATSKILLS]

In due time we found an old road, to which we had been directed,
that led over the mountain to the West Branch. It was a hard pull,
sweetened by blackberries and a fine prospect. The snowbird was
common along the way, and a solitary wild pigeon shot through the
woods in front of us, recalling the nests we had seen on the East
Branch,--little scaffoldings of twigs scattered all through the
trees.

It was nearly noon when we struck the West Branch, and the sun was
scalding hot. We knew that two and three pound trout had been taken
there, and yet we wet not a line in its waters. The scene was
primitive, and carried one back to the days of his grandfather,
stumpy fields, log fences, log houses and barns. A boy twelve or
thirteen years old came out of a house ahead of us eating a piece of
bread and butter. We soon overtook him and held converse with him.
He knew the land well, and what there was in the woods and the
waters. He had walked out to the railroad station, fourteen miles
distant, to see the cars, and back the same day. I asked him about
the flies and mosquitoes, etc. He said they were all gone except the
"blunder-heads;" there were some of them left yet.

"What are blunder-heads?" I inquired, sniffing new game.

"The pesky little fly that gets into your eye when you are
a-fishing."

Ah, yes! I knew him well. We had got acquainted some days before,
and I thanked the boy for the name. It is an insect that hovers
before your eye as you thread the streams, and you are forever
vaguely brushing at it under the delusion that it is a little spider
suspended from your hat-brim; and just as you want to see clea