forest, and under the circumstances, had not so many of the captain's
people passed over the same ground, going and returning, thereby
learning how to avoid the greatest difficulties of the route, and here
and there constructing a rude bridge. They had also blazed the trees,
shortening the road by pointing out its true direction.

At the head of the Otsego, our adventurers were fairly in the
wilderness. Huts had been built to receive the travellers, and here the
whole party assembled, in readiness to make a fresh start in company.
It consisted of more than a dozen persons, in all; the black domestics
of the family being present, as well as several mechanics whom Captain
Willoughby had employed to carry on his improvements. The men sent in
advance had not been idle, any more than those left at the Hutted
Knoll. They had built three or four skiffs, one small batteau, and a
couple of canoes. These were all in the water, in waiting for the
disappearance of the ice; which was now reduced to a mass of
stalactites in form, greenish and sombre in hue, as they floated in a
body, but clear and bright when separated and exposed to the sun. The
south winds began to prevail, and the shore was glittering with the
fast-melting piles of the frozen fluid, though it would have been vain
yet to attempt a passage through it.

The Otsego is a sheet that we have taken more than one occasion to
describe, and the picture it then presented, amidst its frame of
mountains, will readily be imagined by most of our readers. In 1765, no
sign of a settlement was visible on its shores; few of the grants of
land in that vicinity extending back so far. Still the spot began to be
known, and hunters had been in the habit of frequenting its bosom and
its shores, for the last twenty years or more Not a vestige of their
presence, however, was to be seen from the huts of the captain; but