as human depredations were
concerned. No bolts or bars would be necessary for its protection. In
the first place, nobody would visit the spot, and if they did, our
property would be perfectly protected by the law of the woods. It
would be doubtless carefully inspected by any curious banter passing
that way, but theft or robbery are unknown here. True, a bottle of
good liquor, if handled by a visitor, might lose somewhat of its
contents, but it would be drank to the health of the owner, and in a
spirit of good fellowship, and not of theft, all which would be
regarded by woodsmen as strictly within rule, there being, as Hank
Wood said, "no law agin it."

We left the first chain of ponds, and rowed some ten miles up the deep
and sluggish but narrow channel of the river, startling every little
way a deer from its propriety by our presence as it was feeding along
the shore. Few sportsmen ever visit this remote region, and it is
above the range of the lumbermen. We came to some rapids near the
outlet of the second chain of ponds, around which we walked, and up
which the boatmen pushed their little craft. These rapids are a
quarter of a mile in length, with no great amount of fall, but still
enough to prevent the passage up them of a loaded boat. Directly at
the head of these rapids is the "second chain of ponds," three
pleasant little lakelets, of from two to four hundred acres each,
surrounded by dense forests, and shores in the main walled in by huge
boulders and broken rocks. We passed through these, in which were
several loons, or great northern divers, quietly floating, and as they
watched us, sending forth their clear and clarion voices over the
water. We took each a passing shot at them, but with no other effect
than to make them dive quicker and deeper, and stay under longer than
usual; at the flash of our rifles they would go down, and in a few
minutes would be again on the surface sixty rods from us, laughing
aloud, as it were, with their clear and quavering voices, at our
impotent attempts to shoot them.

We left the "second chain of ponds" by the narrow and sluggish inlets,
still the Bog River, here so small that the boatman's oars spanned the
narrow channel, and as crooked a stream as it is possible for one to
be. It flows for miles through a low and marshy region, with dense
alderbushes clustering along the shore, and scattering fir-trees, dead
at the top, standing between these and the forests in the backgrou