474 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
reached the top of Mount Speclater did we lift our eyes 
and behold the promised land of sportsmen—the Canaan, 
not of milk and honey, by a long jump—but of the ferx 
nature— ‘a whole yearth full ‘er God-a-mighty’s wild var- 
mints!” as a sublimity-struck Connecticut Pedlar ejaculated 
from the same point of view! Of a truth it was a wonderful 
sight—looking down at your feet, then off to the South, and 
then to the North-west, upon this wild chaos of savage-looking 
hills, lit up by the scattered shine of thirty-six Lakcs, which, 
within the space of about the same number of miles in length, 
look like bright patches which had fallen in benediction out 
of a summer’s sky into these sullen glooms! 
There they go, far away beneath us—those younger ranks 
of pine-haired Titans, that make the blue line of the Arion- 
dack! See them stretch their misty arms to one another, 
rank upon rank, to form these cordons of impregnable defence 
about those shadowy basins, up from which the silver sheen 
of many a grotesque form of Lake is thrown into our dazzled 
eyes. 
What a sight is this, within twenty-four hours of New 
York, with its smoke, and din, and crush! 
Hurrah! to think that these bright sheets are gleaming 
down through their still blue depths with shoals of the 
magnificent salmon trout, with their dark marbled backs 
and lustrous mottled sides, and that every silver thread of 
river, rivulet and inlet binding them together, glitters upon 
its ripples or within its shaded pools to the arrowy leap of 
that crimson flecked keystrel of the streams, the brook trout! 
Hurrah! hurrah! to think, too, that these unbroken forests 
which still wear the solemn look of Earth’s Primeval births, 
yet shelter within their difficult fastnesses, her earliest chil- 
dren. That the huge moose which came before the red man, 
yet rouses the sluggish echoes with its hoarse bellowings. 
That the red deer whistles and snorts to the boding how! 
