A LAKE-SIDE OUTING. 



225 



lent storm, I might have been more success- 

 ful, but probably the water is too cold. On the 

 other hand, it was a comfort to have land and 

 water about one free from every trace of man's 

 interference. Thank goodness, there were no 

 iron piers and hideous rows of booths and bath- 

 houses ! For aught one could see, the Indians 

 might have left these shores but yesterday. 



Where we now strolled the cliff had been 

 spared for several years, and a rank vegetation 

 covered it from base to top. Squatty willows 

 and dwarf sumachs, golden-rod and chess, a 

 wild grass that recalled the graceful plumes of 

 the Panicum crusgalh' at home ; these held the 

 winds at bay, but were likely, when next it 

 stormed to be carried out to sea, and with them 

 tons of the cliff upon which they grew. As so 

 many of the rank growths near by were heavy 

 with seed, it was and is an unsolved puzzle why 

 there should have been a complete absence of 

 birds. Everything that an ornithologist would 

 say seed-eating birds required was here in pro- 

 fusion ; yet the birds were not. Already the 

 summer migrants had departed I found many 

 warblers' and fly-catchers' nests and the winter 

 birds of the region had not yet appeared. From 

 what I saw this day and afterward in other lo- 

 calities, I am well convinced that, taking the 

 year through, there is no spot, east of the Alle- 



