BIG CLEAE POND. 121 



breakfast, or his rump for dinner, I -do go agin a piinted 

 statut', I can still look you in the face as an honest man, 

 because that statut' don't reach the Shatagee woods, 

 nor the lakes and mountains of the Adirondacks. 



" Good," said I; " Tucker, you talk like a Judge, 

 and without knowing it, have hit upon the legal phi- 

 losophy of Blackstone." 



" I don't know," he replied, " who Blackstone is r 

 but that's the philosophy and the law of the woods, 

 as we understand it." 



We started next morning for Big Clear Pond, as 

 it is called, a circular sheet of water, four or five miles 

 in circumference, and some three miles from St. Regis 

 Lake. Our way again lay over a range of hills, cov- 

 ered with tangled brush, and loose boulders, that 

 made travel exceedingly toilsome. This range of hills 

 divides the head waters of the St. Regis River from 

 those of the Saranac. The lake is properly named. 

 Its waters are clear, and one can look away down into 

 its depths, and see the white pebbles on its gravelly 

 bottom, twenty or thirty feet beneath him. It is ex- 

 ceedingly cold too, and if the trout with which it 

 abounds, are not contented with their home, they are 



not capable of appreciating a good thing. 



r, 



