28 WINTER TALKS ON SUMMER PASTIMES. 



localities began nearly forty years ago, when the regular 

 visitors to those waters could be counted upon your two 

 thumbs and eight fingers, and when you could float fifty 

 miles without meeting a white man or encountering a house. 

 There are now, I am told, a hundred places of entertain- 

 ment within the boundaries of the grand old forest where 

 we used to pitch our tents without fear of molestation from 

 cockney anglers or 'Murray's fools.' As I was saying, Cole's 

 Point was one of my favorite resorts. The occasion to 

 which my memory drifted just now was only distin- 

 guished from many another because of two or three inci- 

 dents which rend3red it especially memorable. I was ac- 

 companied by two of the most companionable fellows I ever 

 met. They were born anglers, and carried with them all 

 the scholarly tastes and joyousness of spirit characteristic of 

 the old masters of the art. Dull care never obtruded his ugly 

 visage within the precincts of their tabernacle. Although 

 they were masters of all the sciences, and had earned all the 

 titles at the disposal of all the schools, they were as free 

 from guile and ostentation as a true angler is from cruelty 

 or conceit. While we were in camp the moon was at her 

 full, so that the nights were as luminous as the early gloam- 

 ing, and as serene and beautiful as the placid waters of the 

 great lake which stretched out inimitably before us. As we 

 sat in rapt ecstacy outside our primitive camp looking up 

 and out upon the unclouded sky, the silvery sheen of the 

 quiet waters and the rugged bluffs which loomed up in the 

 clear moonlight like giant warders at the portals of the lake, 

 no sound broke upon the ear save the low ripple of the tiny 

 rapids just below us, and the occasional whistle of some be- 

 lated wood-bird who had missed his mate. You know I 

 have been a world-wide wanderer. There is not a historic 

 painting, nor a chronicled statue, nor a noted palace, from 

 the Hudson to the Bosphorus, that I have not seen. I have 

 slept upon an Alpine glacier, have sat in wonderment and 

 awe beneath the ponderous dome of St. Peters, have looked 

 down from the belfry of St. Paul's, have traversed the 

 Rhine, have bowed my head at the entrance of the Golden 



