Two or three red-shirted, long-bearded men gave them a rude welcome.  They blanketed and fed Caesar, and picketed him under a low shed built of logs.

John, as hungry as a famished bear, drank a deep draught of a black concoction called tea, which his friends here presented to him, ate a powerful piece of dark bread, interlarded with fried pork, drew up with the others around the fire, and, in reply to their curious questionings, gave them the latest news from the outside world.

For this information he was rewarded by the strange and stirring adventures of wilderness life they related during the quickly flitting evening hours.

They told of the scores who went into the forest in the early part of winter, not to return until late in the spring; of snow-storms and packs of wolves; of herds of deer and moose; they related thrilling stories of men crushed by falling trees, or jammed between logs in the streams, together with incidents of the long winter evenings, usually spent by them in story telling and card playing.  Thus he became acquainted with the routine of camp life.

Wearied at last with the unaccustomed fatigues of the day, he wrapped himself in his cloak, placed his portmanteau under his head for a pillow and floated off to dreamland, under the impression that this gypsying sort of life, was just the one of all others he should most like to live.

The following morning, the path of our traveller struck through a broad reach of the melancholy, weird desolation, called a burnt district.  He rode out, suddenly, from the dewy greenness and balm-breathing atmosphere of the unblighted forest, into sunshine that poured down in torrents from the sky, falling on charred, shining shafts and stumps of trees, and a brilliant carpet of fireweed.

It is nearly impossible to give one who has not seen something of the kind, an adequate impression of the peculiar appearance of such a region.  The strange, grotesque-looking stems, of every imaginable shape, left standing like a company of black dwarfs and giants scattered over the land, some of them surmounted with ebony crowns; some, with heads covered like olden warriors, with jetty helmets; some with brawny, long arms stretched over the pathway as if to seize the passer by, and all with feet planted, seemingly in deep and flaming fire.  How quickly nature goes about repairing her desolations!  So great in this case is her haste to cover up the black, unseemly surface of the earth, that, from the strange resemblance of the weed with which she clothes it to the fiery elements, it would seem as if she had not yet been able to thrust the raging glow out of her fancy, and so its type has crept again over the blighted spot.

John rode on over the glowing ground, the black monsters grimacing and scowling at him as he passed.  What a nice eerie place this would be thought he for witches, wizards, and all Satan’s gentry, of every shape and hue, to hold their high revels in.  And he actually began to shout the witches song—­