from them; you emerged and had a vantage-ground like that of a mountain
peak, and could contemplate them at your ease. Seated upon my raft and
slowly carried by the current or drifted by the breeze, I had many a
long, silent look into the face of the wilderness, and found the
communion good. I was alone with the spirit of the forest-bound lakes,
and felt its presence and magnetism. I played hide-and-seek with it
about the nooks and corners, and lay in wait for it upon a little
island crowned with a clump of trees that was moored just to one side
of the current near the head of the lake.

Indeed, there is no depth of solitude that the mind does not endow with
some human interest. As in a dead silence the ear is filled with its
own murmur, so amid these aboriginal scenes one's feelings and
sympathies become external to him, as it were, and he holds converse
with them. Then a lake is the ear as well as the eye of a forest. It is
the place to go to listen and ascertain what sounds are abroad in the
air. They all run quickly thither and report. If any creature had
called in the forest for miles about, I should have heard it. At times
I could hear the distant roar of water off beyond the outlet of the
lake. The sound of the vagrant winds purring here and there in the tops
of the spruces reached my ear. A breeze would come slowly down the
mountain, then strike the lake, and I could see its footsteps
approaching by the changed appearance of the water. How slowly the
winds move at times, sauntering like one on a Sunday walk! A breeze
always enlivens the fish; a dead calm and all pennants sink, your
activity with your fly is ill-timed, and you soon take the hint and
stop. Becalmed upon my raft, I observed, as I have often done before,
that the life of Nature ebbs and flows, comes and departs, in these
wilderness scenes; one moment her stage is thronged and the next quite
deserted. Then there is a wonderful unity of movement in the two