marshy, but firm and hard, like the lakes of the hilltops, with the same smooth forest-slope surrounding.  Is a reverse process going on here, we wondered, from that we have seen in the prairies, and are these sheets of water to change slowly into marsh, and so to firm land again?  There are a number of such lakes as these, and on the heights above one of the largest, which they have called Bethel, a family of Canadian emigrants have recently “taken up a homestead.”

There was still another chain of prairie-lakes, the “Old Field Ponds,” stretching north and south on our right, and as we wound around them, plashing now and again through the slowly-encroaching water, we had ’Gator-bone Pond upon our right.  The loneliness of the scene was indescribable:  for hours we had been winding in and out among the still lagoons or climbing and descending the ever-steeper, darker hills.  Night was drawing on; stealthy mists came creeping grayly up from the endless Old Field Ponds; fireflies and glow-worms and will-o’-the-wisps danced and glowered amid the intense blackness; frogs croaked, mosquitos shrilled, owls hooted; Barney’s usual deliberate progress became a snail’s pace, which hinted plainly at blankets and the oat-sack,—­when, all at once, a bonfire flamed up from a distant height, and the sagacious quadruped quickened his pace along the steep hill-road.

A very pandemonium of sounds saluted our ears as we emerged from the forest—­lowings and roarings and shriekings of fighting cattle, wild hoots from hoarse masculine throats, the shrill tones of a woman’s angry voice, the discordant notes of an accordion, the shuffle of heavy dancing feet.  We had but happened upon a band of cow-hunters returning homeward with their spoils, and the fightings of their imprisoned cattle were only less frightful than their own wild orgies.  If we had often before been reminded of Italian skies and of the freshness and brightness of Swiss mountain-air, now thoughts of the Black Forest, with all of weird or horrible that we had ever read of that storied country, rushed to our minds—­robber-haunted mills, murderous inns, treacherous hosts, “terribly-strange beds.”  Not that we apprehended real danger, but to our unfranchised and infant minds the chills and fevers which mayhap lurked in the mist-clothed forest, or even a wandering “cat,” seemed less to be dreaded than the wild bacchanals who surrounded us.  We would fain have returned, but it was too late.  Barney was already in the power of unseen hands, which had seized upon him in the darkness; an old virago had ordered us into the house; and when we had declined to partake of the relics of a feast which strewed the table, we were ignominiously consigned to a den of a lean-to opening upon the piazza.  A “terribly-strange bed” indeed was the old four-poster, which swayed and shrieked at the slightest touch, and myriad the enemies which there lay in wait for our blood.  We were not murdered, however, nor did our unseen foes—­as had