e partridge drummed upon his log; the squirrels chattered as
they chased each other up and down the great trunks of the trees; the
loon lifted up his clarion voice away out upon the water; the eagle
and the osprey screamed as they hovered high above us in the air,
while a thousand merry voices came from out the old woods, all
mingling in the harmony of nature's gladness. A loud and repeated
hurrah! burst from us all as our oars struck the water, and sent our
little boats bounding over the rippled surface of the beautiful
Saranac.

This is a indeed a beautiful sheet of water. The shores were lined
with a dense and unbroken forest, stretching back to the mountains
which surround it. The old wood stood then in all its primeval
grandeur, just as it grew. The axe had not harmed it, nor had fire
marred its beauty. The islands were covered with a lofty growth of
living timber clothed in the deepest green. There were not then, as
now, upon some of them, great dead trees reaching out their long bare
arms in verdureless desolation above a stinted undergrowth, and piled
up trunks charred and blackened by the fire that had revelled among
them, but all were green, and thrifty, and glorious in their robes of
beauty. Thousands of happy songsters carolled gaily among their
branches, or hid themselves in the dense foliage of their
wide-spreading arms. The islands are a marked feature of these
northern lakes, lending a peculiar charm to their quiet beauty, and
one day, when the iron horse shall go thundering through these
mountain gorges, the tourist will pause to make a record of their
loveliness.

Four or five miles down the lake, is a beautiful bay, stretching for
near half a mile around a high promontory, almost reaching another bay
winding around a like promontory beyond, leaving a peninsula of five
hundred acres joined to the main land, by a narrow neck of some forty
rods in width. Our first sport among the deer was to be the "driving"
of this peninsula. We stationed ourselves on the narrow isthmus within
a few rods of each other, while a boatman went round to the opposite
side to lay on the dogs. We had been at our posts perhaps half an
hour, when we heard the measured bounds of a deer, as he came crashing
through the forest. We could see his white flag waving above the
undergrowth, as he came bounding towards us. Neither Smith nor
Spalding had ever seen a deer in his native woods, and they were, by a
previous arrangement, to h