For we had proceeded on our deeply-trodden war trail no more than a mile or two before we encountered the raw evidences of an army’s occupation.  Everywhere spotted leads, game trails, and runways had been hacked, trimmed, and widened into more open wood-walks; foot-paths enlarged to permit the passage of mounted men; cattle-roads cleared, levelled, made smoother for wagons and artillery; log bridges built across the rapid streams that darkled westward, swamps and swales paved with logs, and windfalls hewn in twain and the huge abattis dragged wide apart or burnt to ashes where it lay.  Yet, still the high debris bristling from some fallen forest giant sprawling athwart the highway often delayed us.  Our details had not yet cleared out the road entirely.

We were, however, within a wolf-hound’s easy run to Cherry Valley, Fort Hunter, and the Mohawk—­ the outer edges of my own country.  Northeast of us lay Schenectady behind its fort; north of us lay my former home, Guy Park, and near it old Fort Johnson and Johnson Hall.  Farther still to the northward stretched the Vlaie and silvery Sacandaga with its pretty Fish House settlement now in ashes; and Summer House Point and Fonda’s Bush were but heaps of cinders, too, the brave Broadalbin yeomen prisoners, their women and children fled to Johnstown, save old man Stoner and his boys, and that Tory villain Charlie Cady who went off with Sir John.

Truly I should know something of these hills and brooks and forests that we now traversed, and of the silent, solitary roads that crept into the wilderness, penetrating to distant, lonely farms or grist mills where some hardy fellow had cleared the bush and built his cabin on the very borders of that dark and fearsome empire which we were gathering to enter and destroy.

Here it lay, close on our left flank—­ so close that its strange gigantic shadow fell upon us, like a vast hand, stealthy and chill.

And it was odd, but on the edges of these trackless shades, here, even with fresh evidences on every side that our own people lately passed this way—­ yes, even when we began to meet or overtake men of our own color—­ the stupendous desolation yielded nothing of its brooding mystery and dumb magnificence.

Westward, the green monotony of trees stretched boundless as an ocean, and as trackless and uncharted—­ gigantic forests in the depths of which twilight had brooded since first the world was made.

Here, save for the puny, man-made trail—­ save for the tiny scars left by his pygmy hacking at some high forest monument, all this magic shadow-land still bore the imprint of our Lord’s own fingers.

The stillness and the infinite majesty, the haunting fragrance clinging to the craftsmanship of hands miraculous; all the sweet odour and untainted beauty which enveloped it in the making, and which had remained after creation’s handiwork was done, seemed still to linger in this dim solitude.  And it was as though the twilight through the wooded aisles was faintly tinctured still, where the sweet-scented garments of the Lord had passed.