My companions, who were quite fresh and who had not felt the strain of baffled purpose as I had, assumed a more encouraging tone.  After I had rested awhile, and partaken sparingly of the bread and whisky, which in such an emergency is a great improvement on bread and water, I agreed to their proposition that we should make another attempt.  As if to reassure us, a robin sounded his cheery call near by, and the winter wren, the first I had ever heard in these woods, set his music-box going, which fairly ran over with fin, gushing, lyrical sounds.  There can be no doubt but this bird is one of our finest songsters.  If it would only thrive and sing well when caged, like the canary, how far it would surpass that bird!  It has all the vivacity and versatility of the canary, without any of its shrillness.  Its song is indeed a little cascade of melody.

We again retraced our steps, rolling the stone, as it were, back up the mountain, determined to commit ourselves to the line of marked trees.  These we finally reached, and, after exploring the country to the right, saw that bearing to the left was still the order.  The trail led up over a gentle rise of ground, and in less than twenty minutes, we were in the woods I had passed through when I found the lake.  The error I had made was then plain:  we had come off the mountain a few paces too far to the right, and so had passed down on the wrong side of the ridge, into what we afterwards learned was the valley of Alder Creek.

We now made good time, and before many minutes I again saw the mimic sky glance through the trees.  As we approached the lake, a solitary woodchuck, the first wild animal we had seen since entering the woods, sat crouched upon the root of a tree a few feet from the water, apparently completely nonplused by the unexpected appearance of danger on the land side.  All retreat was cut off, and he looked his fate in the face without flinching.  I slaughtered him just as a savage would have done, and from the same motive,—­I wanted his carcass to eat.

The mid-afternoon sun was now shining upon the lake, and a low, steady breeze drove the little waves rocking to the shore.  A herd of cattle were browsing on the other side, and the bell of the leader sounded across the water.  In these solitudes its clang was wild and musical.

To try the trout was the first thing in order.  On a rude raft of log which we found moored at the shore, and which with two aboard shipped about a food of water, we floated out and wet our first fly in Thomas’s Lake; but the trout refused to jump, and to be frank, not more than a dozen and a half were caught during our stay.  Only a week previous, a party of three had taken in a few hours all the fish they could carry out of the woods, and had nearly surfeited their neighbors with trout.  But from some cause, they now refused to rise, or to touch any kind of bait:  so we fell to catching the sunfish, which were small but very abundant.  Their nests