with a smooth brown current."

And in this sheet of burnished bronze the mountains and islands were
reflected perfectly, and the sun shone back from it, not in broken
gleams or a wide lane of light, but like a single ball of fire, moving
before us as we moved.

But stop! What is that dark speck on the water, away down toward Turtle
Point? It has just the shape and size of a deer's head. It seems to
move steadily out into the lake. There is a little ripple, like a wake,
behind it. Hose turns to look at it, and then sends the boat darting
in that direction with long, swift strokes. It is a moment of pleasant
excitement, and we begin to conjecture whether the deer is a buck or
a doe, and whose hounds have driven it in. But when Hose turns to look
again, he slackens his stroke, and says: "I guess we needn't to hurry;
he won't get away. It's astonishin' what a lot of fun a man can get in
the course of a natural life a-chasm' chumps of wood."

We landed on a sand beach at the mouth of a little stream, where a
blazed tree marked the beginning of the Ampersand trail. This line
through the forest was made years ago by that ardent sportsman and lover
of the Adirondacks, Dr. W. W. Ely, of Rochester. Since that time it has
been shortened and improved a little by other travellers, and also not
a little blocked and confused by the lumbermen and the course of Nature.
For when the lumbermen go into the woods, they cut roads in every
direction, leading nowhither, and the unwary wanderer is thereby led
aside from the right way, and entangled in the undergrowth. And as for
Nature, she is entirely opposed to continuance of paths through her
forest. She covers them with fallen leaves, and hides them with thick
bushes. She drops great trees across them, and blots then out with
windfalls. But the blazed line--a succession of broad axe-marks on
the trunks of the trees, just high enough to catch the eye on a
level--cannot be so easily obliterated, and this, after all, is the
safest guide through the woods.

Our trail led us at first through a natural meadow, overgrown with
waist-high grass, and very spongy to the tread. Hornet-haunted also
was this meadow, and therefore no place for idle dalliance or unwary
digression, for the sting of the hornet is one of the saddest and most
humiliating surprises of this mortal life.

Then through a tangle of old wood-roads my guide led me safely, and we
struck one of the long ridges which slope gently