Venice in the forest. In two places stood a small stack of hay on
the bank, ready for the lumberer's use in the winter, looking
strange enough there. We thought of the day when this might be a
brook winding through smooth-shaven meadows on some gentleman's
grounds; and seen by moonlight then, excepting the forest that now
hems it in, how little changed it would appear!

Again and again Joe called the moose, placing the canoe close by
some favorable point of meadow for them to come out on, but listened
in vain to hear one come rushing through the woods, and concluded
that they had been hunted too much thereabouts. We saw many times
what to our imaginations looked like a gigantic moose, with his
horns peering from out the forest-edge; but we saw the forest only,
and not its inhabitants, that night. So at last we turned about.
There was now a little fog on the water, though it was a fine, clear
night above. There were very few sounds to break the stillness of
the forest. Several times we heard the hooting of a great horned-owl,
as at home, and told Joe that he would call out the moose for him,
for he made a sound considerably like the horn,--but Joe answered,
that the moose had heard that sound a thousand times, and knew better;
and oftener still we were startled by the plunge of a musquash. Once,
when Joe had called again, and we were listening for moose, we heard
come faintly echoing, or creeping from far, through the moss-clad
aisles, a dull, dry, rushing sound, with a solid core to it, yet as
if half smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant and fungus-like
forest, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the
damp and shaggy wilderness. If we had not been there, no mortal had
heard it. When we asked Joe in a whisper what it was, he answered,--
"Tree fall." There is something singularly grand and impressive in
the sound of a tree falling in a perfectly calm night like this, as