first come upon one, you will utter an exclamation. I saw nothing like
it in the Adirondacks, nor in Canada. Absolutely without stain or hint
of impurity, it seems to magnify like a lens, so that the bed of the
stream and the fish in it appear deceptively near. It is rare to find
even a trout stream that is not a little "off color," as they say of
diamonds, but the waters in the section of which I am writing have the
genuine ray; it is the undimmed and untarnished diamond.

If I were a trout, I should ascend every stream till I found the
Rondout. It is the ideal brook. What homes these fish have, what
retreats under the rocks, what paved or flagged courts and areas, what
crystal depths where no net or snare can reach them!--no mud, no
sediment, but here and there in the clefts and seams of the rock
patches of white gravel,--spawning-beds ready-made.

The finishing touch is given by the moss with which the rock is
everywhere carpeted. Even in the narrow grooves or channels where the
water runs the swiftest, the green lining is unbroken. It sweeps down
under the stream and up again on the other side, like some firmly woven
texture. It softens every outline and cushions every stone. At a
certain depth in the great basins and wells it of course ceases, and
only the smooth-swept flagging of the place-rock is visible.

The trees are kept well back from the margin of the stream by the want
of soil, and the large ones unite their branches far above it, thus
forming a high winding gallery, along which the fisherman passes and
makes his long casts with scarcely an interruption from branch or twig.
In a few places he makes no cast, but sees from his rocky perch the
water twenty feet below him, and drops his hook into it as into a well.