d 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 wildernes 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 natural order and
continuity, and introducing them abruptly, an abruptness illustrated
by the remark of "Old Man Hoskins" (which Phelps liked to quote),
when one day he suddenly slipped down a bank into a thicket, and
seated himself in a wasps' nest: "I hain't no business here; but here
I be!"

The first time we went into camp on the Upper Au Sable Pond, which
has been justly celebrated as the most prettily set sheet of water in
the region, we were disposed to build our shanty on the south side,
so that we could have in full view the Gothics and that loveliest of
mountain contours. To our surprise, Old Phelps, whose sentimental
weakness for