will do no such thing, and the tenderness with which he is rearing the two beautiful, black-eyed, raven-haired little girls, proves that he will not.  But Smith has no professional calling or business, and when his digestion troubles him, he has visions of the alms-house, and the Potters’ Field, and of two mendicant little girls, while his endorsement would be regarded as good at the bank for a hundred thousand dollars.

Spalding, as everybody within a hundred leagues of the capitol knows, is a lawyer of eminence, full of good-nature, always cheerful, always instructive; a troublesome opponent at the bar; a man of genial sympathies and a big heart.  If I have given him, as well as Smith, a nom de plume, it is out of regard for their modesty.  We arranged to meet at the cars, the next morning at six, each with a rifle and fishing rod, to be away for a month among the deer and the trout, floating over lakes the most beautiful, and along rivers the pleasantest that the sun ever shone upon.

CHAPTER II.

HURRAH!  FOR THE COUNTRY!

Hurrah!  Hurrah!  We are in the country—­the glorious country!  Outside of the thronged streets; away from piled up bricks and mortar; outside of the clank of machinery; the rumbling of carriages; the roar of the escape pipe; the scream of the steam whistle; the tramp, tramp of moving thousands on the stone sidewalks; away from the heated atmosphere of the city, loaded with the smoke and dust, and gasses of furnaces, and the ten thousand manufactories of villainous smells.  We are beyond even the meadows and green fields.  We are here alone with nature, surrounded by old primeval things.  Tall forest trees, mountain and valley are on the right hand and on the left.  Before us, stretching away for miles, is a beautiful lake, its waters calm and placid, giving back the bright heavens, the old woods, the fleecy clouds that drift across the sky, from away down in its quiet depths.  Beyond still, are mountain ranges, whose castellated peaks stand out in sharp and bold relief, on whose tops the beams of the descending sun lie like a mantle of silver and gold.  Glad voices are ringing; sounds of merriment make the evening joyous with the music of the wild things around us.  Hark! how from away off over the water, the voice of the loon comes clear and musical and shrill, like the sound of a clarion; and note how it is borne about by the echoes from hill to hill.  Hark! again, to that clanking sound away up in the air; metallic ringing, like the tones of a bell.  It is the call of the cock of the woods as he flies, rising and falling, glancing upward and downward in his billowy flight across the lake.  Hark! to that dull sound, like blows upon some soft, hollow, half sonorous substance, slow and measured at first, but increasing in rapidity, until it rolls like the beat of a muffled drum, or the low growl of the far-off thunder.  It is the