rmers far in among the mountains
rarely taste fresh meat, but subsist chiefly upon salt pork, fish, fresh
or salted, as the season will permit, potatoes, wheat, rye, and Indian
meal, with berries, dried apples, perhaps a few garden vegetables,
plenty of good milk, and excellent butter. Eggs, chickens, and veal are
luxuries occasionally to be enjoyed, and, should one of the family be a
good shot, venison and partridge may appear upon the bill of fare.
Bright flowers ornament the gardens, and gay creepers embower doors and
windows. Along the more secluded roads are the log cabins of the
charcoal burners, said cabins containing, if apparently nothing else,
two or three healthy, chubby, pretty children, and a substantial cooking
stove, of elaborate pattern, recently patented by some enterprising
compatriot.

Among the most remarkable features of these mountains are the 'Passes,'
answering to Gaps, Notches, and Cloves in other parts of the Union. They
afford means for excellent roads from end to end of the mountain region,
and are, in addition, eminently picturesque. The two most noteworthy are
the Indian and Wilmington Passes; the first too rugged for the present
to admit of a road; and the latter containing the beautiful Wilmington
Fall. Many of the mountains have been burned over, and the bare,
gaunt-limbed timber, and contorted folds of gray, glittering rock,
afford a spectral contrast to the gentler contours of hills still clad
in their natural verdure, bright or dark as deciduous or evergreen trees
preponderate. The variety of form is endless; long ridges, high peaks,
sharp or blunt, sudden clefts, great bare slides, flowing curves, convex
or concave, serrated slopes crowned with dark spruce or jagged as the
naked vertebrae of some enormous antediluvian monster, stimulate the
curiosity and excite the imagination of the beholder. There is an
essential difference in the character of the views obtained, whether
looking from the south, or the east. In the former case, the eye,
following the axes of the ranges, sees the mountains as a cross ridge of
elevated peaks; and in the latter, where the sight strikes the ranges
perpendicularly to their axes, one, or, at most, two ridges are all that
can be seen from any single point.

This region may be approached from Lake Champlain by way of Ticonderoga,
Crown Point, Port Henry, Westport, and Port Kent, the two latter places
being the nearer to the higher peaks; or from the lake c