ead of snow.

In the depressions in the mountains the rocky fragments seemed to
have accumulated, and to have formed what might be called stone
glaciers that were creeping slowly down.

Two hours' march brought us into heavy timber where the stone
cataclysm had not reached, and before long the soft voice of the
Rondout was heard in the gulf below us. We paused at a spring run,
and I followed it a few yards down its mountain stairway, carpeted
with black moss, and had my first glimpse of the unknown stream. I
stood upon rocks and looked many feet down into a still, sunlit pool
and saw the trout disporting themselves in the transparent water,
and I was ready to encamp at once; but my companion, who had not
been tempted by the view, insisted upon holding to our original
purpose, which was to go farther up the stream. We passed a
clearing with three or four houses and a saw-mill. The dam of the
latter was filled with such clear water that it seemed very shallow,
and not ten or twelve feet deep, as it really was. The fish were as
conspicuous as if they had been in a pail.

Two miles farther up we suited ourselves and went into camp.

If there ever was a stream cradled in the rocks, detained lovingly
by them, held and fondled in a rocky lap or tossed in rocky arms,
that stream is the Rondout. Its course for several miles from its
head is over the stratified rock, and into this it has worn a
channel that presents most striking and peculiar features. Now it
comes silently along on the top of the rock, spread out and flowing
over that thick, dark green moss that is found only in the coldest
streams; then drawn into a narrow canal only four or five feet wide,
through which it shoots, black and rigid, to be presently caught in
a deep basin with shelving, overhanging rocks, beneath which the
phoebe-bird builds in security, and upon which the fisherman
stands and casts his twenty or thirty feet of line without fear of
being thwarted by the brush; then into a black, well-like pool, ten
or fifteen feet deep, with a smooth, circular wall of rock on one
side worn by the water through long ages; or else into a deep,
oblong pocket, into which and out of which the water glides without
a ripple.

The surface rock is a coarse sandstone superincumbent upon a
lighter-colored conglomerate that looks like Shawangunk grits, and
when this latter is reached by the water it seems to be rapidly
disintegrated by it, thus forming the deep excava