Slide Mountain is the centre and the chief of the southern Catskills.  Streams flow from its base, and from the base of its subordinates, to all points of the compass,—­the Rondout and the Neversink to the south; the Beaverkill to the west; the Esopus to the north; and several lesser streams to the east.  With its summit as the centre, a radius of ten miles would include within the circle described but very little cultivated land; only a few poor, wild farms in some of the numerous valleys.  The soil is poor, a mixture of gravel and clay, and is subject to slides.  It lies in the valleys in ridges and small hillocks, as if dumped there from a huge cart.  The tops of the southern Catskills are all capped with a kind of conglomerate, or “pudden stone,”—­a rock of cemented quartz pebbles which underlies the coal measures.  This rock disintegrates under the action of the elements, and the sand and gravel which result are carried into the valleys and make up the most of the soil.  From the northern Catskills, so far as I know them, this rock has been swept clean.  Low down in the valleys the old red sandstone crops out, and, as you go west into Delaware County, in many places it alone remains and makes up most of the soil, all the superincumbent rock having been carried away.

Slide Mountain had been a summons and a challenge to me for many years.  I had fished every stream that it nourished, and had camped in the wilderness on all sides of it, and whenever I had caught a glimpse of its summit I had promised myself to set foot there before another season should pass.  But the seasons came and went, and my feet got no nimbler, and Slide Mountain no lower, until finally, one July, seconded by an energetic friend, we thought to bring Slide to terms by approaching him through the mountains on the east.  With a farmer’s son for guide we struck in by way of Weaver Hollow, and, after a long and desperate climb, contented ourselves with the Wittenberg, instead of Slide.  The view from the Wittenberg is in many respects more striking, as you are perched immediately above a broader and more distant sweep of country, and are only about two hundred feet lower.  You are here on the eastern brink of the southern Catskills, and the earth falls away at your feet and curves down through an immense stretch of forest till it joins the plain of Shokan, and thence sweeps away to the Hudson and beyond.  Slide is southwest of you, six or seven miles distant, but is visible only when you climb into a treetop.  I climbed and saluted him, and promised to call next time.

We passed the night on the Wittenberg, sleeping on the moss, between two decayed logs, with balsam boughs thrust into the ground and meeting and forming a canopy over us.  In coming off the mountain in the morning we ran upon a huge porcupine, and I learned for the first time that the tail of a porcupine goes with a spring like a trap.  It seems to be a set-lock; and you no sooner touch with the weight of a hair