on the extreme verge of civilization, if civilization it could be called, and the remaining eight miles were got over in the course of the succeeding day.  This was more than would probably have been achieved in the virgin forest, and under the circumstances, had not so many of the captain’s people passed over the same ground, going and returning, thereby learning how to avoid the greatest difficulties of the route, and here and there constructing a rude bridge.  They had also blazed the trees, shortening the road by pointing out its true direction.

At the head of the Otsego, our adventurers were fairly in the wilderness.  Huts had been built to receive the travellers, and here the whole party assembled, in readiness to make a fresh start in company.  It consisted of more than a dozen persons, in all; the black domestics of the family being present, as well as several mechanics whom Captain Willoughby had employed to carry on his improvements.  The men sent in advance had not been idle, any more than those left at the Hutted Knoll.  They had built three or four skiffs, one small batteau, and a couple of canoes.  These were all in the water, in waiting for the disappearance of the ice; which was now reduced to a mass of stalactites in form, greenish and sombre in hue, as they floated in a body, but clear and bright when separated and exposed to the sun.  The south winds began to prevail, and the shore was glittering with the fast-melting piles of the frozen fluid, though it would have been vain yet to attempt a passage through it.

The Otsego is a sheet that we have taken more than one occasion to describe, and the picture it then presented, amidst its frame of mountains, will readily be imagined by most of our readers.  In 1765, no sign of a settlement was visible on its shores; few of the grants of land in that vicinity extending back so far.  Still the spot began to be known, and hunters had been in the habit of frequenting its bosom and its shores, for the last twenty years or more Not a vestige of their presence, however, was to be seen from the huts of the captain; but Mrs. Willoughby assured her husband, as she stood leaning on his arm, the morning after her arrival, that never before had she gazed on so eloquent, and yet so pleasing a picture of solitude as that which lay spread before her eyes.

“There is something encouraging and soothing in this bland south wind, too,” she added, “which seems to promise that we shall meet with a beneficent nature, in the spot to which we are going.  The south airs of spring, to me are always filled with promise.”

“And justly, love; for they are the harbingers of a renewed vegetation.  If the wind increase, as I think it may, we shall see this chilling sheet of ice succeeded by the more cheerful view of water.  It is in this way, that all these lakes open their bosoms in April.”