Lawi ence level toward the valley of the Hudson, from which it is separated by a slightly elevated ridge. '^•- To tlie fierce Huron of Canada, who loved to make war upon the more southern Iroquois, this lake was a wide open door for his passage. Through it many brave men, aborigines and Europeans, have gone to the war-paths of New York and New England, never to return.

Standing upon Tahawus, it required very little exercise of the imagination to behold the stately procession of historic men and events, passing through that open door. First in dim shadows were the dusky warriors

* In the introduction to hia published semion, preached at r'l3-moutli, in New England, in tlie year 1621 (and the first ever preached there), the Rev. Robert Cushraan, speaking of that country, says :-- "So far as we can find, it is an island, and near about the quantity of England, being cut out from the mainland in America, as England is from the main of Europe, by a great ami of the sea [Hudson's River], which entereth in forty degrees, and runnetli up norlh-west and by west, and goeth out, either into the South Sea [Pacific Ocean], or else into the Bay of Canada [the Gulf of St. Lawrence]." The old divine was nearly right in his conjecture that New England was an island. It is a peninsula, connected to tlie main by a very narrow isthmus, the extremities of wliich are at the villages of Whitehall, on Lalce Champlain, and Fort Edward, on the Hudson, about twenty-five miles apart. The lowest portion of that isthmus is not more tlian fifty feet above Lake Champlain, whose waters are only ninety above the sea. This istlimus is made still narrower by the waters of Wood Creek, which flow into Lake Champlain, and of Fort Edward Creek, wliich empty into the Hudson.