close together; thickets of small trees spring up among the large ones; from year to year the great trunks are falling one across another, and the undergrowth is thickening around them, until a spruce forest seems to be almost impassable.  The constant rain of needles and the crumbling of the fallen trees form a rich, brown mould, into which the foot sinks noiselessly.  Wonderful beds of moss, many feet in thickness, and softer than feathers, cover the rocks and roots.  There are shadows never broken by the sun, and dark, cool springs of icy water hidden away in the crevices.  You feel a sense of antiquity here which you can never feel among the maples and birches.  Longfellow was right when he filled his forest primeval with “murmuring pines and hemlocks.”

The higher one climbs, the darker and gloomier and more rugged the vegetation becomes.  The pine-trees soon cease to follow you; the hemlocks disappear, and the balsams can go no farther.  Only the hardy spruce keeps on bravely, rough and stunted, with branches matted together and pressed down flat by the weight of the winter’s snow, until finally, somewhere about the level of four thousand feet above the sea, even this bold climber gives out, and the weather-beaten rocks of the summit are clad only with mosses and Alpine plants.

Thus it is with mountains, as perhaps with men, a mark of superior dignity to be naturally bald.

Ampersand, falling short by a thousand feet of the needful height, cannot claim this distinction.  But what Nature has denied, human labour has supplied.  Under the direction of the Adirondack Survey, some years ago, several acres of trees were cut from the summit; and when we emerged, after the last sharp scramble, upon the very crest of the mountain, we were not shut in by a dense thicket, but stood upon a bare ridge of granite in the centre of a ragged clearing.

I shut my eyes for a moment, drew a few long breaths of the glorious breeze, and then looked out upon a wonder and a delight beyond description.

A soft, dazzling splendour filled the air.  Snowy banks and drifts of cloud were floating slowly over a wide and wondrous land.  Vast sweeps of forest, shining waters, mountains near and far, the deepest green and the palest blue, changing colours and glancing lights, and all so silent, so strange, so far away, that it seemed like the landscape of a dream.  One almost feared to speak, lest it should vanish.

Right below us the Lower Saranac and Lonesome Pond, Round Lake and the Weller Ponds, were spread out like a map.  Every point and island was clearly marked.  We could follow the course of the Saranac River in all its curves and windings, and see the white tents of the hay-makers on the wild meadows.  Far away to the northeast stretched the level fields of Bloomingdale.  But westward all was unbroken wilderness, a great sea of woods as far as the eye could reach.  And how far it can reach from a height like this!  What