the timid deer and the gentle bear. But in days gone by,
Hunter's Pass was the highway of the whole caravan of animals who were
continually going backward; and forwards, in the aimless, roaming way
that beasts have, between Mud Pond and the Boquet Basin. I think I can
see now the procession of them between the heights of Dix and Nipple
Top; the elk and the moose shambling along, cropping the twigs; the
heavy bear lounging by with his exploring nose; the frightened deer
trembling at every twig that snapped beneath his little hoofs, intent on
the lily-pads of the pond; the raccoon and the hedgehog, sidling along;
and the velvet-footed panther, insouciant and conscienceless, scenting
the path with a curious glow in his eye, or crouching in an overhanging
tree ready to drop into the procession at the right moment. Night and
day, year after year, I see them going by, watched by the red fox
and the comfortably clad sable, and grinned at by the black cat,--the
innocent, the vicious, the timid and the savage, the shy and the bold,
the chattering slanderer and the screaming prowler, the industrious and
the peaceful, the tree-top critic and the crawling biter,--just as it
is elsewhere. It makes me blush for my species when I think of it. This
charming society is nearly extinct now: of the larger animals there only
remain the bear, who minds his own business more thoroughly than any
person I know, and the deer, who would like to be friendly with men, but
whose winning face and gentle ways are no protection from the savageness
of man, and who is treated with the same unpitying destruction as the
snarling catamount. I have read in history that the amiable natives of
Hispaniola fared no better at the hands of the brutal Spaniards than
the fierce and warlike Caribs. As society is at present constituted in
Christian countries, I would rather for my own security be a cougar than
a fawn.

There is not much of romantic interest in the Adirondacks. Out of the
books of daring travelers, nothing. I do not know that the Keene Valley
has any history. The mountains always stood here, and the Au Sable,
flowing now in shallows and now in rippling reaches over the sands
and pebbles, has for ages filled the air with continuous and soothing
sounds. Before the Vermonters broke into it some three-quarters of a
century ago, and made meadows of its bottoms and sugar-camps of its
fringing woods, I suppose the red Indian lived here in his usual
discomfort