In this hasty sketch I have had little space to indulge in picture-painting.  I passed Bridal-Veil Fall without a reference.  I was tempted to loiter on the banks of the Feld-spar and the bright Opalescent, but I passed by without even picking a pebble from the clear basins of its sparkling cascades.  I passed the “tear of the clouds,” four thousand feet above the tide—­that fountain of the Hudson nearest to the sky, without being beguiled into poetry.  I have not ventured upon a description of a sunrise view from the summit of Tahawas, of the magic effect of light above clouds that clothe the surrounding peaks in garments wrought, it seems, of softest wool, until mist and vapor dissolve in roseate colors, and the landscape lies before us like an open book, which many glad eyes have looked upon again and again.  I have left it for your guides to tell you, by roaring camp-fires, long stories of adventure in trapping and hunting, of wondrous fishes that grow longer and heavier every season, although captured and broiled many and many a year ago—­trout and pickerel literally pickled in fiction, served and re-served in the piquant sauce of mountain vocabulary.  In brief, I have kept my imagination and enthusiasm under strict control.  But, after all, the Adirondacks are a wonderland, and we, who dwell in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, are happy in having this great park of Nature’s making at our very doors.

It has charms alike for the hunter, the angler, the artist, the writer, and the scientist.  Let us rejoice, therefore, that the State of New York is waking at last to the fact, that these northern mountains were intended by nature to be something more than lumber ranches, to be despoiled by the axe, and finally revert to the State for “taxes” in the shape of bare and desolate wastes.  Nor can the most practical legislator charge those, who wish to preserve the Adirondack woods, with idle sentiment; as it is now an established scientific fact that the rainfall of a country is largely dependent upon its forest land.  If the water supply of the north were cut off, to any perceptible degree, the Hudson, during the months of July and August, would be a mere sluice of salt water from New York to Albany; and the northern canals, dependent on this supply, would become empty and useless ditches.  Our age is intensely practical, but we are fortunate in this, that so far as the preservation of the Adirondacks is concerned, utility, common sense, and the appreciation of the beautiful are inseparably blended.

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  Wild umbrage far around me clings
    To breezy knoll and hushed ravine,
  And o’er each rocky headland flings
    Its mantle of refreshing green.

  Henry T. Tuckerman.

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