That night the midges, those motes that sting, held high carnival.  We learned afterward, in the settlement below and from the barkpeelers, that it was the worst night ever experienced in that valley.  We had done no fishing during the day, but had anticipated some fine sport about sundown.  Accordingly Aaron and I started off between six and seven o’clock, one going upstream and the other down.  The scene was charming.  The sun shot up great spokes of light from behind the woods, and beauty, like a presence, pervaded the atmosphere.  But torment, multiplied as the sands of the seashore, lurked in every tangle and thicket.  In a thoughtless moment I removed my shoes and socks, and waded in the water to secure a fine trout that had accidentally slipped from my string and was helplessly floating with the current.  This caused some delay and gave the gnats time to accumulate.  Before I had got one foot half dressed I was enveloped in a black mist that settled upon my hands and neck and face, filling my ears with infinitesimal pipings and covering my flesh with infinitesimal bitings.  I thought I should have to flee to the friendly fumes of the old stable, with “one stocking off and one stocking on;” but I got my shoe on at last, though not without many amusing interruptions and digressions.

In a few moments after this adventure I was in rapid retreat toward camp.  Just as I reached the path leading from the shanty to the creek, my companion in the same ignoble flight reached it also, his hat broken and rumpled, and his sanguine countenance looking more sanguinary than I had ever before seen it, and his speech, also, in the highest degree inflammatory.  His face and forehead were as blotched and swollen as if he had just run his head into a hornets’ nest, and his manner as precipitate as if the whole swarm was still at his back.

No smoke or smudge which we ourselves could endure was sufficient in the earlier part of that evening to prevent serious annoyance from the same cause; but later a respite was granted us.

About ten o’clock, as we stood round our camp-fire, we were startled by a brief but striking display of the aurora borealis.  My imagination had already been excited by talk of legends and of weird shapes and appearances, and when, on looking up toward the sky, I saw those pale, phantasmal waves of magnetic light chasing each other across the little opening above our heads, and at first sight seeming barely to clear the treetops, I was as vividly impressed as if I had caught a glimpse of a veritable spectre of the Neversink.  The sky shook and trembled like a great white curtain.

After we had climbed to our loft and had lain down to sleep, another adventure befell us.  This time a new and uninviting customer appeared upon the scene, the genius loci of the old stable, namely, the “fretful porcupine.”  We had seen the marks and work of these animals about the shanty, and had been careful each night to hang our traps, guns, etc., beyond their reach, but of the prickly night-walker himself we feared we should not get a view.