Hunter, the head, proved to be a first-rate type of an Americanized Irishman.  His wife was a Scotch woman.  They had a family of five or six children, two of them grown-up daughters,—­modest, comely young women as you would find anywhere.  The elder of the two had spent a winter in New York with her aunt, which made her a little more self-conscious when in the presence of the strange young men.  Hunter was hired by the company at a dollar a day to live here and see that things were not wantonly destroyed, but allowed to go to decay properly and decently.  He had a substantial roomy frame house and any amount of grass and woodland.  He had good barns and kept considerable stock, and raised various farm products, but only for his own use, as the difficulties of transportation to market some seventy miles distant make it no object.  He usually went to Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain once a year for his groceries, etc.  His post-office was twelve miles below at the Lower Works, where the mail passed twice a week.  There was not a doctor, or lawyer, or preacher within twenty-five miles.  In winter, months elapse without their seeing anybody from the outside world.  In summer, parties occasionally pass through here on their way to Indian Pass and Mount Marcy.  Hundreds of tons of good timothy hay annually rot upon the cleared land.

After nightfall we went out and walked up and down the grass-grown streets.  It was a curious and melancholy spectacle.  The remoteness and surrounding wildness rendered the scene doubly impressive.  And the next day and the next the place was an object of wonder.  There were about thirty buildings in all, most of them small frame houses with a door and two windows opening into a small yard in front and a garden in the rear, such as are usually occupied by the laborers in a country manufacturing district.  There was one large two-story boarding-house, a schoolhouse with cupola and a bell in it, and numerous sheds and forges, and a saw-mill.  In front of the saw-mill, and ready to be rolled to their place on the carriage, lay a large pile of pine logs, so decayed that one could run his walking-stick through them.  Near by, a building filled with charcoal was bursting open and the coal going to waste on the ground.  The smelting works were also much crumbled by time.  The schoolhouse was still used.  Every day one of the daughters assembles her smaller brothers and sisters there and school keeps.  The district library contained nearly one hundred readable books which were well thumbed.

The absence of society had made the family all good readers.  We brought them an illustrated newspaper, which was awaiting them in the post-office at the Lower Works.  It was read and reread with great eagerness by every member of the household.

The iron ore cropped out on every hand.  There was apparently mountains of it; one could see it in the stones along the road.  But the difficulties met with in separating the iron from its alloys, together with the expense of transportation and the failure of certain railroad schemes, caused the works to be abandoned.  No doubt the time is not distant when these obstacles will be overcome and this region reopened.