24 NATURAL HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICA, 



About half way up a hill lay five or six huge logs of timber 

 across the middle of the road. " Them's to keep people from 

 getting stuck in that springy place, I guess," said the boy. 

 Nice hill to drive down of a dark night, thought I. After a 

 while the boy said it would be all good road, and we at once 

 went into soft mud up to the axle-trees. At last we arrived : 

 I made a bargain for accommodation, and returned, per wag- 

 gon, to Utica for my luggage. 



Of all the beautiful combinations of wood, rock, and water 

 that I have seen, this is the sweetest. Had I the pencil of 

 Salvator Rosa, or the pen of a Milton, I might try to give you 

 some faint idea of it ; but I feel really unable to make you com- 

 prehend, much less to feel, the beauty of the scene, by any 

 words of mine. Imagine on each side of the stream a steep 

 lime-stone rock, evidently worn by the attrition of water, 

 presenting in some places a broken slope, with here and there 

 a vast projecting mass overhanging the stream, in others a 

 steep and inaccessible declivity of various height, almost per- 

 fectly smooth, and worn by the current during the lapse of 

 ages ; imagine these rocks crowned with vast Hemlocks, 

 Beeches, Birches, &c., and the steeps clad with Arbor-vitag, 

 twenty to forty feet in height, and a variety of other shrubs, 

 extending to the water's edge; imagine the occasional flats 

 and intermediate spaces clothed with thousands of species of 

 flowers and plants, now springing up so rapidly that every 

 hour makes a change, and you will form some idea of the 

 walls through which the mass of waters pours along the valley. 

 Dark, gloomy, and cool, are some parts of its recesses, for even 

 now, though the thermometer has been at 63° in the shade, 

 vast masses of snow remain unmelted. 



From a narrow passage between the rocks the water rushes 

 most furiously ; then, spreading out to three times the width of 

 the pass, boils tumultuously, a sheet of foam being spread over 

 its surface ; a little lower it becomes more calm, then again it 

 leaps roaring over a rock fifteen feet in height ; it soon again 

 becomes less agitated, but still flows most rapidly, till it comes 

 to the principal fall ; here it pours down a perpendicular sheet 

 of foam on to the rocks, which break its fall into the abyss 

 below ; it now rushes furiously through another narrow pass, 

 and continues its foaming course over masses of rock till it 

 joins the Mohawk. After the sun has past the meridian an 



