from one sheet of water to another on the backs of the woodsmen, around the cascades, and over tracts of intervening land through virgin forests, without roads, and, to a large extent, without paths.  I hoped here to find new subjects for art, spiritual freedom, and a closer contact with the spiritual world—­something beyond the material existence.  I was ignorant of the fact that art does not depend on a subject, nor spiritual life on isolation from the rest of humanity, and I found, what a correct philosophy would have before told me, nature with no suggestion of art, and the dullest form of intellectual or spiritual existence.

One of my artist friends—­S.R.  Gifford, landscape painter, like myself on the search for new subjects—­had been, the year before, to the Saranac Lakes, and gave me the clue to the labyrinth, and I found on Upper Saranac Lake a log cabin, inhabited by a farmer whose family consisted of a wife, a son, and a daughter.  There I enjoyed a backwoods hospitality at the cost of two dollars a week for board and lodging, and passed the whole summer, finding a subject near the cabin, at which I painted assiduously for nearly three months.  I passed the whole day in the open air, wore no hat, and only cloth shoes, hoping that thus the spiritual life would have easier access to me.  I carried no gun, and held the lives of beast and bird sacred, but I drew the line at fishing, and my rod and fly-book provided in a large degree the food of the household; for trout swarmed.  I caught in an hour, during that summer, in a stream where there has not been a trout for years, as large a string as I could carry a mile.  All the time that I was not painting I was in the boat on the lake, or wandering in the forest.

My quest was an illusion.  The humanity of the backwoods was on a lower level than that of a New England village—­more material if less worldly; the men got intoxicated, and some of the women—­nothing less like an apostle could I have found in the streets of New York.  I saw one day a hunter who had come into the woods with a motive in some degree like mine—­impatience of the restraints and burdens of civilization, and pure love of solitude.  He had become, not bestialized, like most of the men I saw, but animalized—­he had drifted back into the condition of his dog, with his higher intellect inert.  He had built himself a cabin in the depth of the woods, and there he lived in the most complete isolation from human society he could attain.  He interested me greatly, and as he stopped for the night at the cabin where I was living, we had considerable conversation.  He cared nothing for books, but enjoyed nature, and only hunted in order to live, respecting the lives of his fellow-creatures within that limit.  He only went to the “settlements” when he needed supplies, abstained from alcoholic drinks, the great enemy of the backwoodsman, and was happy in his solitude.  As he was the first man I had ever met who had attempted the solution of the problem which so interested me,—­the effect of solitude on the healthy intellect,—­I encouraged him to talk, which he was inclined to do when he found that there was a real sympathy between us on this question.