Albany, was little kuowu to Avhite men, excepting hunters and trappers, and a few isolated settlers ; and the knowledge of its sources among lofty alpine ranges is one of the revelations made to the present century, and even to the present generation. And now very few, excepting the hunters of that region, have personal knowledge of the beauty and wild grandeur of lake, and forest, and mountain, out of which spring the fountains of the river w^e are about to describe. To these fountains and their forest courses I made a pilgrimage toward the close of the summer of 1859, accompanied by Mrs. Lossing and Mr. S. M. Buckingham, an American genth;man, formerly engaged in mercantile business in Manchester, England, and who has travelled extensively in the East.

Our little company, composed of the minimum in the old prescription for a dinner-party -- not more than the Muses nor less than the Graces -- left our homes, in the pleasant rural city of Poughkeepsie, on the Hudson, for the Avildernesss of northern New York, by a route which we are satisfied, by experience and observation, to be the best for the tourist or sportsman bound for the head waters of that river, or the high plateau northward and westward of them, where lie in solitary beauty a multitude of lakes filled with delicious fish, and embosomed in primeval forests abounding with deer and other game. We travelled by railway about one hundred and fifty miles to "Whitehall, a small village in a rocky gorge, where Wood Creek leaps in cascades into the head of L-ikc Champlain. There we tarried until the following morning, and at ten o'clock embarked upon a steamboat for Port Kent -- our point of departure for the wild interior, far down the lake on its western border.