DIFFERENT YET THE SAME.

43

spring time, and it is curious to see what an object of interest the river becomes. Its rise and fall are the chief topics of conversation. So goes the world-New York has its objects of interest-the country village its —and the settler on the frontier his-each one is filled with the same anxieties, hopes, fears and wishesovercome by the same discouragements and misfortunes, and working out the same fate; man still with that mysterious soul and restless heart of his, greater than a king, and immortal as an angel, yet absorbed with straws and maddened or thrown into raptures by a little glittering dust.

V

FORESTWARD DINNER SCENE-PREPARATIONS TO ASCEND

MOUNT TAHAWUS.

BACKWOODS, July 10, 1846.

DEAR H-:

It will be a long time before I am again by a post office where I can get a letter to you. If you wish to know the pleasure of seeing a newspaper from New York, bury yourself in the woods for three or four weeks, where not a pulsation of the great busy world can reach you, nor a word from its ten thousand tongues and pens meet your ear or eye. The sight of one, then, fresh from the press, putting in your hands again the links of that great chain of human events you had lost-re-binding you to your race, and replacing you in the mighty movement that bears all things onward, is most welcome. You cannot conceive the contrasts, nay, almost the shocks of feeling one experiences in stepping from the crowded city into

the dense forest where his couch is the boughs he himself cuts, and his companions the wild deer and the birds; or in emerging again into civilized life, and listening to the strange tumult that has not ceased in his absence. One seems to have dreamed twice-nay, to be in a dream yet. Yesterday, as it were, I was walking the crowded streets of New York; last evening, in a birch-bark canoe, with an Indian beside me, nearly a day's journey from a human habitation, sailing over a lake whose green shores have never been marred by the axe of civilization, and on whose broad expanse not a boat was floating, but that which guided me and my companions on. For miles the Indian has carried this canoe on his head through the woods, and now it is breasting the waves that come rolling like fluid gold from the west. The sun is going to his repose amid the purple mountains-the blue sky seems to lift in the elastic atmosphere-the scream of the wild bird fills the solitude, and all is strange and new, while green islands untrodden by man greet us as we steer towards yonder distant point, where our camp-fire is to be lighted to-night. Glorious scene-glorious evening! with my Indian and my rifle by my sideskimming in this canoe along the clear waters, how

far

away seem the strifes of men and the discords of life. To-night my couch of balsam boughs shall be welcome, until the cloudless morn floods this wild scene with light.

But I find I am getting on too fast. To begin at the beginning-I started with four companions, from where I had been for some time fishing, for a stretch through the wilderness, to ascend Mount Marcy, as it is foolishly called,-properly Mount Tahawus,—and go through the famous Indian Pass. Here there are no mule paths, as in Switzerland, leading to the bases of mountains, whence you can mount to the summits; but all is woods! woods! woods! The highest and most picturesque of the Adirondack peaks lie deep in the forest, where none but an experienced guide can carry you. To reach Mount Tahawus, you must come in from Caldwell or Westport, about thirty miles, in a mail wagon, and then you have a stretch of some forty miles through the woods to the Adirondack Iron Works. There is but one road to these Works, where it stops, and he who would go farther must take to the pathless woods; indeed, it was made solely for these iron quarries, by the company which owns them.

Well, here we are, in the heart of the forest, five of us, bumping along in a lumber wagon over a road you would declare a civilized team could not travel.* Now straining up a steep ascent-now whang to the axle-tree between the rocks, and now lying at an angle of forty-five degrees, and again carefully lifting ourselves over a fallen tree, we tumble and bang along at the enormous rate of two miles an hour. By dint of persuasion, the use of the whip, and a thousand "he-ups," we have acquired this velocity, and been able to keep it for the last seven hours. But man and beast grow weary-it is one o'clock, and as the forest is but half traversed, a dinner must be had in some way. In three minutes the horses are unhitched, and eating from the wagon-in three more a cheerful fire is crackling in the woods, and our knapsacks are scattered around, disgorging their contents. Here is a bit of pork, here some ham, tongue, anchovy-paste, bread, &c., &c., strung along like a column of infantry, on a moss-covered log, and each one with his pocket-knife is doing his devoirs. We eat with an appetite that would throw a French cook into ecstacies, did he but shut his eyes to our bill of

• It has been improved since, and is now quite good.