tions alluded to.

My eyes had never before beheld such beauty in a mountain stream.
The water was almost as transparent as the air,--was, indeed, like
liquid air; and as it lay in these wells and pits enveloped in
shadow, or lit up by a chance ray of the vertical sun, it was a
perpetual feast to the eye,--so cool, so deep, so pure; every reach
and pool like a vast spring. You lay down and drank or dipped the
water up in your cup, and found it just the right degree of
refreshing coldness. One is never prepared for the clearness of the
water in these streams. It is always a surprise. See them every year
for a dozen years, and yet, when you first come upon one, you will
utter an exclamation. I saw nothing like it in the Adirondacks, nor
in Canada. Absolutely without stain or hint of impurity, it seems to
magnify like a lens, so that the bed of the stream and the fish in
it appear deceptively near. It is rare to find even a trout stream
that is not a little "off color," as they say of diamonds, but the
waters in the section of which I am writing have the genuine ray; it
is the undimmed and untarnished diamond.

If I were a trout, I should ascend every stream till I found the
Rondout. It is the ideal brook. What homes these fish have, what
retreats under the rocks, what paved or flagged courts and areas,
what crystal depths where no net or snare can reach them!--no mud,
no sediment, but here and there in the clefts and seams of the rock
patches of white gravel,--spawning-beds ready-made.

The finishing touch is given by the moss with which the rock is
everywhere carpeted. Even in the narrow grooves or channels where
the water runs the swiftest, the green lining is unbroken. It sweeps
down under the stream and up again on the other side, like some
firmly woven texture. It softens every outline and cushions every
stone. At a certain depth in the great basins and wells it of course
ceases, and only the smooth-swept flagging of the place-rock is
visible.

The trees are kept well back from the margin of the stream by the
want of soil, and the large ones unite their branches far above it,
thus forming a high winding gallery, along which the fisherman
passes and makes his long casts with scarcely an interruption from
branch or twig. In a few places he makes no cast, but sees from his
rocky perch the water twenty feet below him, and drops his hook into
it as into a well.

We made camp at a bend in the creek where there was a