A pleasant task we had in reflooring and reroofing the log-hut with balsam boughs against the night.  Plenty of small balsams grew all about, and we soon had a huge pile of their branches in the old hut.  What a transformation, this fresh green carpet and our fragrant bed, like the deep-furred robe of some huge animal, wrought in that dingy interior!  Two or three things disturbed our sleep.  A cup of strong beef-tea taken for supper disturbed mine; then the porcupines kept up such a grunting and chattering near our heads, just on the other side of the log, that sleep was difficult.  In my wakeful mood I was a good deal annoyed by a little rabbit that kept whipping in at our dilapidated door and nibbling at our bread and hardtack.  He persisted even after the gray of the morning appeared.  Then about four o’clock it began gently to rain.  I think I heard the first drop that fell.  My companions were all in sound sleep.  The rain increased, and gradually the sleepers awoke.  It was like the tread of an advancing enemy which every ear had been expecting.  The roof over us was of the poorest, and we had no confidence in it.  It was made of the thin bark of spruce and balsam, and was full of hollows and depressions.  Presently these hollows got full of water, when there was a simultaneous downpour of bigger and lesser rills upon the sleepers beneath.  Said sleepers, as one man, sprang up, each taking his blanket with him; but by the time some of the party had got themselves stowed away under the adjacent rock, the rain ceased.  It was little more than the dissolving of the nightcap of fog which so often hangs about these heights.  With the first appearance of the dawn I had heard the new thrush in the scattered trees near the hut,—­a strain as fine as if blown upon a fairy flute, a suppressed musical whisper from out the tops of the dark spruces.  Probably never did there go up from the top of a great mountain a smaller song to greet the day, albeit it was of the purest harmony.  It seemed to have in a more marked degree the quality of interior reverberation than any other thrush song I had ever heard.  Would the altitude or the situation account for its minor key?  Loudness would avail little in such a place.  Sounds are not far heard on a mountain-top; they are lost in the abyss of vacant air.  But amid these low, dense, dark spruces, which make a sort of canopied privacy of every square rod of ground, what could be more in keeping than this delicate musical whisper?  It was but the soft hum of the balsams, interpreted and embodied in a bird’s voice.

It was the plan of two of our companions to go from Slide over into the head of the Rondout, and thence out to the railroad at the little village of Shokan, an unknown way to them, involving nearly an all-day pull the first day through a pathless wilderness.  We ascended to the topmost floor of the tower, and from my knowledge of the topography of the country I pointed out to them their course, and where the