cliffs, and well wooded all the way. It was a long woodland lake
bordered with willows. For long reaches we could see neither
house nor cultivated field, nor any sign of the vicinity of
man. Now we coasted along some shallow shore by the edge of a
dense palisade of bulrushes, which straightly bounded the water
as if clipt by art, reminding us of the reed forts of the
East-Indians, of which we had read; and now the bank slightly
raised was overhung with graceful grasses and various species of
brake, whose downy stems stood closely grouped and naked as in a
vase, while their heads spread several feet on either side. The
dead limbs of the willow were rounded and adorned by the climbing
mikania, _Mikania scandens_, which filled every crevice in the
leafy bank, contrasting agreeably with the gray bark of its
supporter and the balls of the button-bush. The water willow,
_Salix Purshiana_, when it is of large size and entire, is the most
graceful and ethereal of our trees. Its masses of light green
foliage, piled one upon another to the height of twenty or thirty
feet, seemed to float on the surface of the water, while the
slight gray stems and the shore were hardly visible between
them. No tree is so wedded to the water, and harmonizes so well
with still streams. It is even more graceful than the weeping
willow, or any pendulous trees, which dip their branches in the
stream instead of being buoyed up by it. Its limbs curved outward
over the surface as if attracted by it. It had not a New England
but an Oriental character, reminding us of trim Persian gardens,
of Haroun Alraschid, and the artificial lakes of the East.

As we thus dipped our way along between fresh masses of foliage
overrun with the grape and smaller flowering vines, the surface
was so calm, and both air and water so transparent, that the