“Now, my friend,” said I, “we can go to Canada, or to the Maine woods, or to the Adirondacks, and thus have a whole loaf and a big loaf of this bread which you know as well as I will have heavy streaks in it, and will not be uniformly sweet; or we can seek nearer woods, and content ourselves with one week instead of four, with the prospect of a keen relish to the last.  Four sylvan weeks sound well, but the poetry is mainly confined to the first one.  We can take another slice or two of the Catskills, can we not, without being sated with kills and dividing ridges?”

“Anywhere,” replied Aaron, “so that we have a good tramp and plenty of primitive woods.  No doubt we should find good browsing on Peakamoose, and trout enough in the streams at its base.”

So without further ado we made ready, and in due time found ourselves, with our packs on our backs, entering upon a pass in the mountains that led to the valley of the Rondout.

The scenery was wild and desolate in the extreme, the mountains on either hand looking as if they had been swept by a tornado of stone.  Stone avalanches hung suspended on their sides, or had shot down into the chasm below.  It was a kind of Alpine scenery, where crushed and broken boulders covered the earth instead of snow.

In the depressions in the mountains the rocky fragments seemed to have accumulated, and to have formed what might be called stone glaciers that were creeping slowly down.

Two hours’ march brought us into heavy timber where the stone cataclysm had not reached, and before long the soft voice of the Rondout was heard in the gulf below us.  We paused at a spring run, and I followed it a few yards down its mountain stairway, carpeted with black moss, and had my first glimpse of the unknown stream.  I stood upon rocks and looked many feet down into a still, sunlit pool and saw the trout disporting themselves in the transparent water, and I was ready to encamp at once; but my companion, who had not been tempted by the view, insisted upon holding to our original purpose, which was to go farther up the stream.  We passed a clearing with three or four houses and a saw-mill.  The dam of the latter was filled with such clear water that it seemed very shallow, and not ten or twelve feet deep, as it really was.  The fish were as conspicuous as if they had been in a pail.

Two miles farther up we suited ourselves and went into camp.

If there ever was a stream cradled in the rocks, detained lovingly by them, held and fondled in a rocky lap or tossed in rocky arms, that stream is the Rondout.  Its course for several miles from its head is over the stratified rock, and into this it has worn a channel that presents most striking and peculiar features.  Now it comes silently along on the top of the rock, spread out and flowing over that thick, dark green moss that is found only in the coldest streams; then drawn into a narrow canal only four or five feet wide,