an three
days without their worldly--baggage. Taking the party altogether,
from one cause or another it is likely to strike camp sooner than was
intended. And the stricken camp is a melancholy sight. The woods have
been despoiled; the stumps are ugly; the bushes are scorched; the
pine-leaf-strewn earth is trodden into mire; the landing looks like a
cattle-ford; the ground is littered with all the unsightly dibris of a
hand-to-hand life; the dismantled shanty is a shabby object; the charred
and blackened logs, where the fire blazed, suggest the extinction of
family life. Man has wrought his usual wrong upon Nature, and he can
save his self-respect only by moving to virgin forests.

And move to them he will, the next season, if not this. For he who has
once experienced the fascination of the woods-life never escapes its
enticement: in the memory nothing remains but its charm.

VII. A WILDERNESS ROMANCE

At the south end of Keene Valley, in the Adirondacks, stands Noon Mark,
a shapely peak thirty-five hundred feet above the sea, which, with the
aid of the sun, tells the Keene people when it is time to eat dinner.
From its summit you look south into a vast wilderness basin, a great
stretch of forest little trodden, and out of whose bosom you can hear
from the heights on a still day the loud murmur of the Boquet. This
basin of unbroken green rises away to the south and southeast into the
rocky heights of Dix's Peak and Nipple Top,--the latter a local name
which neither the mountain nor the fastidious tourist is able to shake
off. Indeed, so long as the mountain keeps its present shape as seen
from the southern lowlands, it cannot get on without this name.

These two mountains, which belong to the great system of which Marcy
is the giant centre, and are in the neighborhood of five thousand
feet high, on the southern outposts of the great mountains, form the
gate-posts of the pass into the south country. This opening between them
is called Hunter's Pass. It is the most elevated and one of the wildest
of the mountain passes. Its summit is thirty-five hundred feet high. In
former years it is presumed the hunters occasionally followed the game
through; but latterly it is rare to find a guide who has been that way,
and the tin-can and paper-collar tourists have not yet made it a runway.
This seclusion is due not to any inherent difficulty of travel, but to
the fact that it lies a little out of the way.

We went through