For miles our track lay through the solitary forest, its silence disturbed only by the sound of a mountain brook, or the voices of the wind among the hills. The winding road was closely hemmed by trees and shrubs, and sentineled by lofty pines, and birches, and tamaracks, many of them dead, and ready to fall at the touch of the next strong wind. Miles apart were the rude cabins of the settlers, until we came out upon a high, rolling valley, surrounded by a magnificent amphitheatre of hills. Through that valley, from a little lake toward

THE HUDSON.

the sources of the Au Sable, flows the cold and rapid Boreas River, one of the chief tributaries of the Tipper Hudson. The view was now grand : all around us stood the great hills, wooded to their summits, and overlooking deep valleys, wherein the primeval forest had never been touched by axe or fire ; and on the right, through tall trees, Ave had glimpses of an irregular little lake, called Cheney Pond. For three or four miles after passing the Boreas we went over a most dreary " clearing," dotted with blackened stumps and boulders as thick as hail, a cold north-west wind driving at our backs. In the midst of it is Wolf Pond, a dark

Witter fringed with a tangled growth of alders, shrubs, and creepers, and made doubly gloomy by hundreds of dead trees, that shoot up from the chapparal.

This was the "darkness just before daylight," for we soon struck a branch of the Scarron, rushing in cascades through a rocky ravine, along whose banks we found an excellent road. The surrounding country was very rugged in appearance. The rocky hills had been denuded by fire, and everything in nature presented a strong contrast to the scene that burst upon the vision at sunset, when, from the brow of a hill, we saw the beautiful Scarron valley smiling before us.