shy creature vanished in time to save its life, through
the thick tops of the adjacent trees. Near the top of the ridge, he
fired at a red-tailed hawk which had alighted on the top of a pine stub;
the distance was too great, however, and the hawk sailed away placidly.

After crossing the ridge, the path led us through denser, darker woods.
A large animal which Willis thought to be a bear, but Addison and Thomas
deemed more likely to be a deer, was heard to run away through a copse
of cedar, a little in advance of us. We passed some very large swamp
elms here and several basswoods fully four feet in diameter.

At length, a few minutes before twelve o'clock, by the old silver watch
(which Kate had brought from home to keep time for us during the trip)
we came out at the "skedaddlers' fort," where we had planned to stop
for lunch and make a pot of coffee. This was the first time I had heard
of this old structure, thus singularly named. But Willis, Thomas and
Kate knew its history; Addison and our girls had also heard accounts of
it.

It stood in the midst of a little opening--now overgrown again--made by
felling the great bass, hemlock, and spruce trees, of which its log
walls were built. In length, it may have been forty feet, by about
twenty-five in width. It was substantially roofed with logs and "splits"
covered with gravel. There were little ports, six or eight inches
square, at intervals in the walls, at a height of six or seven feet from
the ground, and one heavy door, or gate, of hewn plank, five or six
inches thick. The little brook in the valley flows beneath one corner of
the building, ensuring water to those who may have dwelt within.

This log structure, suggestive both of warfare and refugee life, was a
great puzzle to a party of city young men who not many years ago
penetrated these forest solitudes, on a hunting excursion. They
concluded that it was built at a time when defense against the Indians
was necessary. A writer for a New York magazine, who seems to have
stumbled on this old "block-house," as he calls it, also came to the
conclusion that it was a relic of early border warfare.

It is nothing of the sort, however, and instead of being a hundred years
old, it is less than fifty. The city visitors did not make proper
allowance for the rapidity with which, in a damp, dense forest,
everything made of wood becomes moss-grown and decays.

During the Civil War, there was a class of so-called "skedaddl