Our little fleet swung out upon the water, while the sun was yet hanging like a great torch among the tops of the trees, on the eastern hills.  It was a beautiful morning, so fresh, so genial, so balmy.  A pleasant breeze came sweeping lazily over the lake, and went sighing and moaning among the old forest trees.  All around us were glad voices.  The partridge drummed upon his log; the squirrels chattered as they chased each other up and down the great trunks of the trees; the loon lifted up his clarion voice away out upon the water; the eagle and the osprey screamed as they hovered high above us in the air, while a thousand merry voices came from out the old woods, all mingling in the harmony of nature’s gladness.  A loud and repeated hurrah! burst from us all as our oars struck the water, and sent our little boats bounding over the rippled surface of the beautiful Saranac.

This is a indeed a beautiful sheet of water.  The shores were lined with a dense and unbroken forest, stretching back to the mountains which surround it.  The old wood stood then in all its primeval grandeur, just as it grew.  The axe had not harmed it, nor had fire marred its beauty.  The islands were covered with a lofty growth of living timber clothed in the deepest green.  There were not then, as now, upon some of them, great dead trees reaching out their long bare arms in verdureless desolation above a stinted undergrowth, and piled up trunks charred and blackened by the fire that had revelled among them, but all were green, and thrifty, and glorious in their robes of beauty.  Thousands of happy songsters carolled gaily among their branches, or hid themselves in the dense foliage of their wide-spreading arms.  The islands are a marked feature of these northern lakes, lending a peculiar charm to their quiet beauty, and one day, when the iron horse shall go thundering through these mountain gorges, the tourist will pause to make a record of their loveliness.

Four or five miles down the lake, is a beautiful bay, stretching for near half a mile around a high promontory, almost reaching another bay winding around a like promontory beyond, leaving a peninsula of five hundred acres joined to the main land, by a narrow neck of some forty rods in width.  Our first sport among the deer was to be the “driving” of this peninsula.  We stationed ourselves on the narrow isthmus within a few rods of each other, while a boatman went round to the opposite side to lay on the dogs.  We had been at our posts perhaps half an hour, when we heard the measured bounds of a deer, as he came crashing through the forest.  We could see his white flag waving above the undergrowth, as he came bounding towards us.  Neither Smith nor Spalding had ever seen a deer in his native woods, and they were, by a previous arrangement, to have the first shot, if circumstances should permit it.  The noble animal came dashing proudly on his way, as if in contempt of the danger he was leaving behind him.  Of the greater danger into which he was rushing, he was entirely unconscious, until the crack of Smith’s rifle broke upon his astonished ear.  He was unharmed, however, and quick as thought he wheeled and plunged back in the direction from which he came; Spalding’s rifle, as it echoed through the forest, with the whistling of the ball in close proximity to his head, added energy to his flight.