crouched wildcat eyed them from the thicket; now through the
maze of water-girded rocks, which the white cedar and the spruce clasped
with serpent-like roots, or among islands where old hemlocks darkened
the water with deep green shadow. Here, too, the rock-maple reared its
verdant masses, the beech its glistening leaves and clean, smooth stem,
and behind, stiff and sombre, rose the balsam-fir. Here in the tortuous
channels the muskrat swam and plunged, and the splashing wild duck dived
beneath the alders or among the red and matted roots of thirsty water
willows. Aloft, the white-pine towered above a sea of verdure; old
fir-trees, hoary and grim, shaggy with pendent mosses, leaned above the
stream, and beneath, dead and submerged, some fallen oak thrust from the
current its bare, bleached limbs, like the skeleton of a drowned giant.
In the weedy cove stood the moose, neck-deep in water to escape the
flies, wading shoreward, with glistening sides, as the canoes drew near,
shaking his broad antlers and writhing his hideous nostril, as with
clumsy trot he vanished in the woods.

In these ancient wilds, to whose ever verdant antiquity the pyramids are
young and Nineveh a mushroom of yesterday; where the sage wanderer
of the Odyssey, could he have urged his pilgrimage so far, would have
surveyed the same grand and stern monotony, the same dark sweep of
melancholy woods;--here, while New England was a solitude, and the
settlers of Virginia scarcely dared venture inland beyond the sound of a
cannon-shot, Champlain was planting on shores and islands the emblems
of his faith. Of the pioneers of the North American forests, his name
stands foremost on the list. It was he who struck the deepest and
boldest strokes into the heart of their pristine barbarism. At
Chantilly, at Fontainebleau, Paris, in the cabinets of princes and of
royalty itself, mingling with the proud vanities of the court; then lost
from sight in the depths of Canada, the companion of savages, sharer of
their toils, privations, and battles, more hardy, patient, and bold than
they;--such, for successive years, were the alternations of this man's
life.

To follow on his trail once more. His Indians said that the rapids
of the river above were impassable. Nicolas de Vignan affirmed the
contrary; but, from the first, Vignau had been found always in the
wrong. His aim seems to have been to involve his leader in difficulties,
and disgust him with a journey which must