looked upon that
treacherous wilderness, I thought with misgivings of those two
friends groping their way there, and would have given much to know
how it fared with them. Their concern was probably less than my own,
because they were more ignorant of what was before them. Then there
was just a slight shadow of a fear in my mind that I might have been
in error about some points of the geography I had pointed out to
them. But all was well, and the victory was won according to the
campaign which I had planned. When we saluted our friends upon their
own doorstep a week afterward, the wounds were nearly healed and
the rents all mended.

When one is on a mountain-top, he spends most of the time in looking
at the show he has been at such pains to see. About every hour we
would ascend the rude lookout to take a fresh observation. With a
glass I could see my native hills forty miles away to the northwest.
I was now upon the back of the horse, yea, upon the highest point of
his shoulders, which had so many times attracted my attention as a
boy. We could look along his balsam-covered back to his rump, from
which the eye glanced away down into the forests of the Neversink,
and on the other hand plump down into the gulf where his head was
grazing or drinking. During the day there was a grand procession of
thunderclouds filing along over the northern Catskills, and letting
down veils of rain and enveloping them. From such an elevation one
has the same view of the clouds that he does from the prairie or the
ocean. They do not seem to rest across and to be upborne by the
hills, but they emerge out of the dim west, thin and vague, and grow
and stand up as they get nearer and roll by him, on a level but
invisible highway, huge chariots of wind and storm.

In the afternoon a thick cloud threatened us, but it proved to be
the condensation of vapor that announces a cold wave. There was soon
a marked fall in the temperature, and as night drew near it became
pretty certain that we were going to have a cold time of it. The
wind rose, the vapor above us thickened and came nearer, until it
began to drive across the summit in slender wraiths, which curled
over the brink and shut out the view. We became very diligent in
getting in our night wood, and in gathering more boughs to calk up
the openings in the hut. The wood we scraped together was a sorry
lot, roots and stumps and branches of decayed spruce, such as we
could collect without an axe,