ut the enthusiastic stoic had no reason to complain of want of
appreciation in the rest of the party. When we were descending, he told
us, with mingled humor and scorn, of a party of ladies he once led to
the top of the mountain on a still day, who began immediately to talk
about the fashions! As he related the scene, stopping and facing us in
the trail, his mild, far-in eyes came to the front, and his voice rose
with his language to a kind of scream.

"Why, there they were, right before the greatest view they ever saw,
talkin' about the fashions!"

Impossible to convey the accent of contempt in which he pronounced the
word "fashions," and then added, with a sort of regretful bitterness, "I
was a great mind to come down, and leave 'em there."

In common with the Greeks, Old Phelps personified the woods, mountains,
and streams. They had not only personality, but distinctions of sex. It
was something beyond the characterization of the hunter, which
appeared, for instance, when he related a fight with a panther, in such
expressions as, "Then Mr. Panther thought he would see what he could
do," etc. He was in "imaginative sympathy" with all wild things. The
afternoon we descended Marcy, we went away to the west, through the
primeval forests, toward Avalanche and Colden, and followed the course
of the charming Opalescent. When we reached the leaping stream, Phelps
exclaimed,

"Here's little Miss Opalescent!"

"Why don't you say Mr. Opalescent?" some one asked.

"Oh, she's too pretty!" And too pretty she was, with her foam-white
and rainbow dress, and her downfalls, and fountainlike uprising. A
bewitching young person we found her all that summer afternoon.

This sylph-like person had little in common with a monstrous lady whose
adventures in the wilderness Phelps was fond of relating. She was built
some thing on the plan of the mountains, and her ambition to explore was
equal to her size. Phelps and the other guides once succeeded in raising
her to the top of Marcy; but the feat of getting a hogshead of molasses
up there would have been easier. In attempting to give us an idea of her
magnitude that night, as we sat in the forest camp, Phelps hesitated a
moment, while he cast his eye around the woods: "Waal, there ain't no
tree!"

It is only by recalling fragmentary remarks and incidents that I can put
the reader in possession of the peculiarities of my subject; and
this involves the wrenching of things out of their n