g along; and the
velvet-footed panther, insouciant and conscienceless, scenting the
path with a curious glow in his eye, or crouching in an overhanging
tree ready to drop into the procession at the right moment. Night and
day, year after year, I see them going by, watched by the red fox and
the comfortably clad sable, and grinned at by the black cat,--the
innocent, the vicious, the timid and the savage, the shy and the bold,
the chattering slanderer and the screaming prowler, the industrious
and the peaceful, the tree-top critic and the crawling biter,--just as
it is elsewhere. It makes me blush for my species when I think of it.
This charming society is nearly extinct now: of the larger animals
there only remain the bear, who minds his own business more thoroughly
than any person I know, and the deer, who would like to be friendly
with men, but whose winning face and gentle ways are no protection
from the savageness of man, and who is treated with the same unpitying
destruction as the snarling catamount. I have read in history that
the amiable natives of Hispaniola fared no better at the hands of the
brutal Spaniards than the fierce and warlike Caribs. As society is at
present constituted in Christian countries, I would rather for my own
security be a cougar than a fawn.

There is not much of romantic interest in the Adirondacks. Out of
the books of daring travelers, nothing. I do not know that the Keene
Valley has any history. The mountains always stood here, and the Au
Sable, flowing now in shallows and now in rippling reaches over the
sands and pebbles, has for ages filled the air with continuous and
soothing sounds. Before the Vermonters broke into it some
three-quarters of a century ago, and made meadows of its bottoms and
sugar-camps of its fringing woods, I suppose the red Indian lived here
in his usual discomfort, and was as restless as his successors, the
summer boarders. But the streams were full of trout then, and the
moose and the elk left their broad tracks on the sands of the river.
But of the Indian there is no trace. There is a mound in the valley,
much like a Tel in the country of Bashan beyond the Jordan, that may
have been built by some pre-historic race, and may contain treasure
and the seated figure of a preserved chieftain on his slow way
to Paradise. What the gentle and accomplished race of the
Mound-Builders should want in this savage region where the frost kills
the early potatoes and stunts t