upon its fading verge, but a wild land of mountains, stern, rugged,
tumultuous, rising one beyond another like the waves of a stormy
ocean,--Ossa piled upin Pelion,--Mcintyre's sharp peak, and the ragged
crest of the Gothics, and, above all, Marcy's dome-like head, raised
just far enough above the others to assert his royal right as monarch of
the Adirondacks.

But grandest of all, as seen from this height, was Mount Seward,--a
solemn giant of a mountain, standing apart from the others, and looking
us full in the face. He was clothed from base to summit in a dark,
unbroken robe of forest. Ou-kor-lah, the Indians called him--the Great
Eye; and he seemed almost to frown upon us in defiance. At his feet, so
straight below us that it seemed almost as if we could cast a stone
into it, lay the wildest and most beautiful of all the Adirondack
waters--Ampersand Lake.

On its shore, some five-and-twenty years ago, the now almost forgotten
Adirondack Club had their shanty--the successor of "the Philosophers'
Camp" on Follensbee Pond. Agassiz, Appleton, Norton, Emerson, Lowell,
Hoar, Gray, John Holmes, and Stillman, were among the company who made
their resting-place under the shadow of Mount Seward. They had bought a
tract of forest land completely encircling the pond, cut a rough road to
it through the woods, and built a comfortable log cabin, to which they
purposed to return summer after summer. But the civil war broke out,
with all its terrible excitement and confusion of hurrying hosts: the
club existed but for two years, and the little house in the wilderness
was abandoned. In 1878, when I spent three weeks at Ampersand, the cabin
was in ruins, and surrounded by an almost impenetrable growth of bushes.
The only philosophers to be seen were a family of what the guides
quaintly call "quill pigs." The roof had fallen to the ground;