46 East and West 
Later appeared a little company of rose- 
breasted grosbeaks, and while they sang 
constantly and appeared to be at home around 
the clearing, when we left Raquette the first 
week in June and took another camp on Long 
Lake, we saw no more grosbeaks through- 
out the season. This was strange, inasmuch 
as by the side of Long Lake is a con- 
siderable clearing, the work of ancient settlers 
in what is popularly known as the heart of the 
Adirondacks. 
Songbirds, for the most part, like men, do 
not belong to the wilderness proper, but to the 
outskirts—the clearings. Perhaps only wild 
animals ever penetrate to the real heart of it, 
for wherever civilised man is, there it is the 
border merely. No matter how far within he 
may go, he is still without. The Heart of 
the Wilderness is a mythical region wherein 
the foot of man has never trod and upon 
which he has never set eyes. When he thinks 
he has reached it, like the drumming of the 
grouse, it is still beyond. In the dim ages of 
faun and satyr his ancestors lost for him the 
key, and ever since, that mysterious place 
has been invisible to the eye of civilisation. 
When the lumbermen have traversed every 
foot of ground, and cut down the last tree, 
