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. The day was fine, and the shores of the lake, clustered with historical associations, presented a series of beautiful pictures ; for they were rich with forest verdure, the harvests of a fruitful seed-time, and thrifty villages and farmhouses. Behind these, on the east, arose the lofty ranges of the Green Mountains, in Vermont ; and on the west were the Adirondacks of New York, whither we were journeying, their clustering peaks, distant and shadowy, bathed in the golden light of a summer afternoon.