Wise and polite,—­and if I drew
    Their several portraits, you would own
    Chaucer had no such worthy crew,
    Nor Boccace in Decameron.

We crossed Champlain to Keeseville with our friends,
Thence, in strong country carts, rode up the forks
Of the Ausable stream, intent to reach
The Adirondac lakes.  At Martin’s Beach
We chose our boats; each man a boat and guide,—­
Ten men, ten guides, our company all told.

Next morn, we swept with oars the Saranac,
With skies of benediction, to Round Lake,
Where all the sacred mountains drew around us,
Tahawus, Seaward, MacIntyre, Baldhead,
And other Titans without muse or name. 
Pleased with these grand companions, we glide on,
Instead of flowers, crowned with a wreath of hills. 
We made our distance wider, boat from boat,
As each would hear the oracle alone. 
By the bright morn the gay flotilla slid
Through files of flags that gleamed like bayonets,
Through gold-moth-haunted beds of pickerel-flower,
Through scented banks of lilies white and gold,
Where the deer feeds at night, the teal by day,
On through the Upper Saranac, and up
Pere Raquette stream, to a small tortuous pass
Winding through grassy shallows in and out,
Two creeping miles of rushes, pads and sponge,
To Follansbee Water and the Lake of Loons.

Northward the length of Follansbee we rowed,
Under low mountains, whose unbroken ridge
Ponderous with beechen forest sloped the shore. 
A pause and council:  then, where near the head
Due east a bay makes inward to the land
Between two rocky arms, we climb the bank,
And in the twilight of the forest noon
Wield the first axe these echoes ever heard. 
We cut young trees to make our poles and thwarts,
Barked the white spruce to weatherfend the roof,
Then struck a light and kindled the camp-fire.

The wood was sovran with centennial trees,—­
Oak, cedar, maple, poplar, beech and fir,
Linden and spruce.  In strict society
Three conifers, white, pitch and Norway pine,
Five-leaved, three-leaved and two-leaved, grew thereby,
Our patron pine was fifteen feet in girth,
The maple eight, beneath its shapely tower.

‘Welcome!’ the wood-god murmured through the leaves,—­
‘Welcome, though late, unknowing, yet known to me.’ 
Evening drew on; stars peeped through maple-boughs,
Which o’erhung, like a cloud, our camping fire. 
Decayed millennial trunks, like moonlight flecks,
Lit with phosphoric crumbs the forest floor.

Ten scholars, wonted to lie warm and soft
In well-hung chambers daintily bestowed,
Lie here on hemlock-boughs, like Sacs and Sioux,
And greet unanimous the joyful change. 
So fast will Nature acclimate her sons,
Though late returning to her pristine ways. 
Off soundings, seamen do not suffer cold;
And, in the forest, delicate clerks, unbrowned,