through which it shoots, black and rigid, to be presently caught in a deep basin with shelving, overhanging rocks, beneath which the phoebe-bird builds in security, and upon which the fisherman stands and casts his twenty or thirty feet of line without fear of being thwarted by the brush; then into a black, well-like pool, ten or fifteen feet deep, with a smooth, circular wall of rock on one side worn by the water through long ages; or else into a deep, oblong pocket, into which and out of which the water glides without a ripple.

The surface rock is a coarse sandstone superincumbent upon a lighter-colored conglomerate that looks like Shawangunk grits, and when this latter is reached by the water it seems to be rapidly disintegrated by it, thus forming the deep excavations alluded to.

My eyes had never before beheld such beauty in a mountain stream.  The water was almost as transparent as the air,—­was, indeed, like liquid air; and as it lay in these wells and pits enveloped in shadow, or lit up by a chance ray of the vertical sun, it was a perpetual feast to the eye,—­so cool, so deep, so pure; every reach and pool like a vast spring.  You lay down and drank or dipped the water up in your cup, and found it just the right degree of refreshing coldness.  One is never prepared for the clearness of the water in these streams.  It is always a surprise.  See them every year for a dozen years, and yet, when you first come upon one, you will utter an exclamation.  I saw nothing like it in the Adirondacks, nor in Canada.  Absolutely without stain or hint of impurity, it seems to magnify like a lens, so that the bed of the stream and the fish in it appear deceptively near.  It is rare to find even a trout stream that is not a little “off color,” as they say of diamonds, but the waters in the section of which I am writing have the genuine ray; it is the undimmed and untarnished diamond.

If I were a trout, I should ascend every stream till I found the Rondout.  It is the ideal brook.  What homes these fish have, what retreats under the rocks, what paved or flagged courts and areas, what crystal depths where no net or snare can reach them!—­no mud, no sediment, but here and there in the clefts and seams of the rock patches of white gravel,—­spawning-beds ready-made.

The finishing touch is given by the moss with which the rock is everywhere carpeted.  Even in the narrow grooves or channels where the water runs the swiftest, the green lining is unbroken.  It sweeps down under the stream and up again on the other side, like some firmly woven texture.  It softens every outline and cushions every stone.  At a certain depth in the great basins and wells it of course ceases, and only the smooth-swept flagging of the place-rock is visible.

The trees are kept well back from the margin of the stream by the want of soil, and the large ones unite their branches far above it, thus forming a high winding gallery, along which the fisherman passes and makes his long casts with scarcely an interruption from branch or twig.  In a few places he makes no cast, but sees from his rocky perch the water twenty feet below him, and drops his hook into it as into a well.