CHAPTER XVI.

ROUND POND--THE PILE DRIVER--A THEORY FOR SPIRITUALISTS.

We put up our tents the next evening, on a bold bluff near the outlet
of Round Pond, a picturesque and pleasant sheet of water, some eight
or ten miles in circumference. It lay there still and waveless, in
that calm summer evening, as glassy and smooth as if no breeze had
ever stirred its surface. All around it were old forests, old hills
and rocks, and away off in the distance were the tall peaks of the
Adirondacks, standing up grim, solemn, and shadowy in the distance.
These peaks are seen from almost every direction. They tower so far
above the surrounding highlands, that they seem always to be peering
over the intervening ranges, as if holding an everlasting watch over
the broad wilderness beneath them. This lake is probably more than a
thousand feet above the Rackett, and the river falls that distance
principally at the two rapids around which our boats were carried. The
rest of the way it is a deep, sluggish stream, so that the descent
may be reckoned within less than three miles. A ledge of rocks forms
the lower boundary of the lake, through which the water, at some
remote period, broke its way, and it goes roaring down rapids for
three-quarters of a mile, then moves in a sluggish current across a
plain of several miles in extent; then plunges down a steep descent
for over a mile and a half to subside again into quiet, and move on
with a sluggish current to plunge down the ledges again into Tupper's
Lake. There are no perpendicular falls of more than twenty feet, but
the water goes plunging, and boiling, and foaming down shelving rocks,
and eddying, and whirling around immense boulders, rushing and roaring
through the gorges with a voice like thunder. These falls are all
useless here, and probably will be for centuries to come; but were
they out in the "living world," in the midst of civilization, with a
fertile and populous region about them, they would soon be harnessed
to great wheels, and made utilitarian; the clank of machinery would
soon be heard above the roar of their waters. They would do an
immensity of labor on their returnless journey to the ocean. But here,
they are utterly valueless, wasting their mighty power upon desolate
rocks, rushing in mad and impotent fury forever through a region of
barrenness and sterility, so far as the uses of civilization are
concerned, a region where the manufacturer or the agriculturist w