and ill-looking a donkey as could be found in a week's travel. The
half-breed was a sort of half fisherman and half hunter, excelling in
nothing, unless it be that he was the laziest man this side of the
Rocky Mountains. He succeeded, occasionally, in killing a deer in the
forest, and when he did so, he would lead his donkey to the place of
slaughter, and bring in the carcase on the long-eared animal's back.

"We were passing from the Chazy to Bradley's Lake, and had sat down on
the trunk of a fallen tree to take a short breathing spell. It was a
warm afternoon, and the air was calm; not a breath stirred the leaves
on the old trees around us; the forest sounds were hushed, save the
tap of the woodpecker on his hollow tree, or an occasional drumming of
a partridge on his log. It was drawing towards one of those calm,
still, autumnal evenings of which poets sing, but which are to be met
with in all their glory only among the beautiful lakes that lay
sleeping in the wild woods, and surrounded by old primeval things. The
path wound round a densely wooded and sombre hollow, the depths of
which the eye could not penetrate, but from out of which came the song
of a stream that went cascading down the rocks, and rippling among the
loose boulders that lay in its course. Beyond us, through an opening
in the trees, we could see the lake, sparkling and shining in the
evening sunbeams, and we were talking about the beauty of the view,
and the calmness and repose that seemed resting upon all things, when,
of a sudden, there came up from that shadowy dell a sound, the most
unearthly that ever broke upon the astonished ear of mortal man. I
have heard the roar of the lion of the desert, the yell of the hyena,
the trumpeting of the elephant, the scream of the panther, the howl of
the wolf. It was like none of these; but if you could imagine them all
combined, and concentrated into a single sound, and ushered together
upon the air from a single throat, shaped like the long neck of some
gigantic ichthiosaurus of the times of old, you would have some faint
idea of the strange sounds that came roaring up from that hollow way.
My friend was a man of courage, and, like myself, had been around the
world some; had spent a good deal of time, first and last, in the
woods, was familiar with most of the legitimate forest sounds, and had
heard all the ten thousand voices that belong in the wilderness, but
we had never before listened to a noise like th