landscape.  Along the face of the dark cliffs all was rough, and gloomy, and picturesque.  How different was the scene below!  Here everything looked soft, and smiling, and beautiful.  There were broad stretches of woodland, where the thick foliage of the trees met and clustered together, so that it looked like the surface of the earth itself; but we knew it was only the green leaves, for here and there were spots of brighter green, that we saw were glades covered with grassy turf.  The leaves of the trees were of different colours, for it was now late in the autumn.  Some were yellow, and some of a deep claret colour:  some were bright-red, and some of a beautiful maroon; and there were green, and brighter green, and others of a silvery-whitish hue.  All these colours were mingled together, and blended into each other, like the flowers upon a rich carpet.  Near the centre of the valley was a large shining object, which we knew to be water.  It was evidently a lake of crystal purity, and smooth as a mirror.  The sun was now up to meridian height, and his yellow beams falling upon its surface caused it to gleam like a sheet of gold.  We could not trace the outlines of the water, for the trees partially hid it from our view, but we saw that the smoke that had at first attracted us rose up somewhere from the western shore of the lake.’  In this strange oasis they found what appeared to be a snug farm-house, with stables and outhouses, garden and fields, horses and cattle.  Here they were hospitably entertained by the proprietor, his wife, and two sons, and served by a faithful negro; and of course it is the history of the settlers, and their struggles, expedients, and contrivances which form the staple of the work.

In this history we have the process of building a log-house, and the usual modes of assembling round the squatter such of the comforts of life as may be obtained in the desert; but our family Robinson appears to have been the most ingenious as well as the most fortunate of adventurers, for there are very few, even of the luxuries of civilised society, which are beyond his reach.  The natural history of the book, however, is its main feature; and the adventures of the lost family with the unreasoning denizens of the desert remind us not unfrequently of the pictures of Audubon.  This is among the earliest:—­’There were high cliffs fronting us, and along the face of these five large reddish objects were moving, so fast that I at first thought they were birds upon the wing.  After watching them a moment, however, I saw that they were quadrupeds; but so nimbly did they go, leaping from ledge to ledge, that it was impossible to see their limbs.  They appeared to be animals of the deer species, somewhat larger than sheep or goats; but we could see that, in place of antlers, each of them had a pair of huge curving horns.  As they leaped downward, from one platform of the cliffs to another, we fancied that they whirled about in the air, as though they were “turning somersaults,”