oming down out of the sky in the centre of the
curve. I do not know anything exactly like this fall, which some
poetical explorer has named the Fairy-Ladder Falls. It appears to have
a height of something like a hundred and fifty feet, and the water
falls obliquely across the face of the cliff from left to right in short
steps, which in the moonlight might seem like a veritable ladder for
fairies. Our impression of its height was confirmed by climbing the very
steep slope at its side some three or four hundred feet. At the top we
found the stream flowing over a broad bed of rock, like a street in the
wilderness, slanting up still towards the sky, and bordered by low firs
and balsams, and bowlders completely covered with moss. It was above the
world and open to the sky.

On account of the tindery condition of the woods we made our fire on the
natural pavement, and selected a smooth place for our bed near by on the
flat rock, with a pool of limpid water at the foot. This granite couch
we covered with the dry and springy moss, which we stripped off in heavy
fleeces a foot thick from the bowlders. First, however, we fed upon the
fruit that was offered us. Over these hills of moss ran an exquisite
vine with a tiny, ovate, green leaf, bearing small, delicate berries,
oblong and white as wax, having a faint flavor of wintergreen and the
slightest acid taste, the very essence of the wilderness; fairy food, no
doubt, and too refined for palates accustomed to coarser viands. There
must exist somewhere sinless women who could eat these berries without
being reminded of the lost purity and delicacy of the primeval senses.
Every year I doubt not this stainless berry ripens here, and is
unplucked by any knight of the Holy Grail who is worthy to eat it,
and keeps alive, in the prodigality of nature, the tradition of the
unperverted conditions of taste before the fall. We ate these berries, I
am bound to say, with a sense of guilty enjoyment, as if they had been
a sort of shew-bread of the wilderness, though I cannot answer for
the chaplain, who is by virtue of his office a little nearer to these
mysteries of nature than I. This plant belongs to the heath family, and
is first cousin to the blueberry and cranberry. It is commonly called
the creeping snowberry, but I like better its official title of
chiogenes,--the snow-born.

Our mossy resting-place was named the Bridal Chamber Camp, in the
enthusiasm of the hour, after darkness fell