tempest, and no great gains at last.  But the sturgeon fishers, who come later and are seen the whole summer through, have an indolent, lazy time of it.  They fish around the ‘slack-water,’ catching the last of the ebb and the first of the flow, and hence drift but little either way.  To a casual observer they appear as if anchored and asleep.  But they wake up when they have a ‘strike,’ which may be every day, or not once a week.  The fishermen keep their eye on the line of buoys, and when two or more of them are hauled under, he knows his game has run foul of the net, and he hastens to the point.  The sturgeon is a pig, without the pig’s obstinacy.  He spends much of the time rooting and feeding in the mud at the bottom, and encounters the net, coarse and strong, when he goes abroad.  He strikes, and is presently hopelessly entangled, when he comes to the top and is pulled into the boat, like a great sleepy sucker.  For so dull and lubbery a fish, the sturgeon is capable of some very lively antics; as, for instance, his habit of leaping full length into the air and coming down with a great splash.  He has thus been known to leap unwittingly into a passing boat, to his own great surprise, and to the alarm and consternation of the inmates.”

* * *

  The swelling river, into his green gulfs,
  Unshadowed save by passing sails above,
  Takes the redundant glory, and enjoys
  The summer in his chilly bed.

  William Cullen Bryant.

* * *

    I heard the plaintiff note of the Whip-poor-will from the
    mountain-side, or was startled now and then by the
    sudden leap and heavy splash of the sturgeon.

    Washington Irving.

* * *

=Germantown.=—­Germantown Station is now seen on the east bank, and between this and Germantown Dock, three miles to the north, is obtained the best view of the “Man in the Mountain,” readily traced by the following outline:  The peak to the south is the knee, the next to the north is the breast, and two or three above this the chin, the nose and the forehead.  How often from the slope of Hillsdale, forty miles away on the western trend of the Berkshires, when a boy, playing by the fountain-heads of the Kinderhook and the Roeliffe Jansen’s Creek, have I looked out upon this mountain range aglow in the sunset, and at even-tide heard my grandfather tell of his far-off journeys to Towanda, Pennsylvania, when he drove through the great Cloves of the Catskills, where twice he met “a bear” which retreated at the sound of his old flint-lock, and then when I went to sleep at night how I pulled the coverlet closer about my head, all on account of those two bears that had been dead for more than forty years.

[Illustration:  THE MAN IN THE MOUNTAIN.]

* * *

  And, sister, now my children come
    To find the water just as cool,
  To play about our grandsire’s home,
    To see our pictures in the pool.