side of this simple roof, while the titmouse lisps in the pine, and the
genial warmth of the sun around the door is somewhat kind and human.

After two seasons, this rude dwelling does not deform the scene. Already
the birds resort to it, to build their nests, and you may track to its
door the feet of many quadrupeds. Thus, for a long time, nature overlooks
the encroachment and profanity of-man. The wood still cheerfully and
unsuspiciously echoes the strokes of the axe that fells it, and while they
are few and seldom, they enhance its wildness, and all the elements strive
to naturalize the sound.

Now our path begins to ascend gradually to the top of this high hill,
from whose precipitous south side we can look over the broad country, of
forest and field and river, to the distant snowy mountains. See yonder
thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible
farm-house; the standard raised over some rural homestead. There must be
a warmer and more genial spot there below, as where we detect the vapor
from a spring forming a cloud above the trees. What fine relations are
established between the traveller who discovers this airy column from some
eminence in the forest, and him who sits below. Up goes the smoke as
silently and naturally as the vapor exhales from the leaves, and as busy
disposing itself in wreathes as the housewife on the hearth below. It is a
hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more intimate and important
things than the boiling of a pot. Where its fine column rises above the
forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted itself,--and such is
the beginning of Rome, the establishment of the arts, and the foundation
of empires, whether on the prairies of America, or the steppes of Asia.

And now we descend again to the brink of this woodland lake, which lies in
a hollow of the hills, as if it were their expressed juice, and that of