KTAADN. 
81 
civilizing in a degree. The lakes are something which 
you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed 
to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe 
on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, 
like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first 
water, —- so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that 
are to take place on their shores, even now civil and 
refined, and fair as they can ever be. These are not 
the artificial forests of an English king, — a royal pre¬ 
serve merely. Here prevail no forest laws but those 
of nature. The aborigines have never been dispos¬ 
sessed, nor nature disforested. 
It is a country full of evergreen trees, of mossy silver 
birches and watery maples, the ground dotted with in¬ 
sipid, small, red berries, and strewn with damp and 
moss-grown rocks,—a country diversified with innu¬ 
merable lakes and rapid streams, peopled with trout and 
various species of leucisci , with salmon, shad, and pick¬ 
erel, and other fishes; the forest resounding at rare in¬ 
tervals with the note of the chicadee, the blue-jay, and 
the woodpecker, the scream of the fish-hawk and the 
eagle, the laugh of the loon, and the whistle of ducks 
along the solitary streams ; at night, with the hooting 
of owls and howling of wolves; in summer, swarming 
with myriads of black flies and mosquitoes, more formi¬ 
dable' than wolves to the white man. Such is the home 
of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, 
and the Indian. Who shall describe the inexpressible 
tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where 
Nature, though it be mid-winter, is ever in her spring, 
where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, 
but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and blissful, inno¬ 
cent Nature, like a serene infant, is too happy to make 
4 =& 
p 
