ighty feet apart, generally from twelve to fourteen. The water
sometimes rushes smoothly and deeply below, and sometimes falls over
obstructions, roaring, and tumbling, and foaming. The turns in the river
are very sudden, and there are great cracks and gullies extending from
top to base, pillars of rock standing alone or leaning against their
companions. Occasionally, looking down one of these clefts, one sees
nothing but the rock walls with a foaming, rapid rushing below. At one
of these most remarkable points, a rude stairway has been constructed,
by which the traveller can descend to the bottom, and, standing by the
water's edge, look up to the top of this singular chasm. The walls
finally lower, and the river flows out into a broad basin, whence it ere
long finds its way into Lake Champlain. The banks are wooded with pines,
hemlocks, spruce, arbor vitaae, beech, birch, and basswood, and the
ground is covered with ferns, harebells, arbutus, linnaea, mitchella,
blue lobelia, and other wild flowers.

There is an excellent inn, the Adirondac House, in Keeseville. Our
attentive host told us of Professor Agassiz, and the fiery nature of his
speculations regarding the probable history of the sandstone, whose
strata, laid as at Trenton Falls, horizontally, layer above layer, add
such interest and beauty to the stupendous walls, with their unseen,
water-covered depths below, and their graceful wreaths of arbor vittae
nodding and swaying above.

He also told us a tale of the war of 1812, when a bridge, known as the
'High Bridge,' crossed the Au Sable at the narrowest point, some eleven
feet in width. A rumor was abroad that the British were about to march
up from Plattsburg; whereupon the bridge, consisting of three beams,
each nine inches wide, was stripped of its planking. A gentleman had
left his home in the morning, and, ignorant of the fate of the bridge,
returned quite late at night. Urging his steed forward, it refused to
cross the bridge, and not until after repeated castigation would it make
the attempt. The crossing was safely accomplished, and the rider
suspected nothing amiss until he reached home and was asked how he had
come. 'By the High Bridge,' was his reply; whereupon he was informed
that the planking had been torn away, and he must have crossed upon a
string piece nine inches wide, hanging some hundred feet above the
surface of the water. His sensations may be imagined.

A venturesome expedition had also