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The game laws conspire with the climate to limit the activity of the sportsman from December to May. During this period the cunning trout and the retiring deer are constructively secure from the hand of the spoiler. It is generally believed, however, that both venison and trout are sometimes served on Adirondack tables, and numbers of innocent persons are made accessories after the fact to flagrant violations of the law. When trout are caught during these months they suffer a change of name and are known as "chubs." Under various names venison also appears during the same period. The legitimate sport of the season, however, is the hunting of the fox and rabbit; an occupation full of zest and excitement for those whose love of the chase makes them indifferent to long tramps and extreme cold. To the uninitiated the lion's share of the excitement of fox and rabbit hunting seems appropriated by the dogs, who discover the scent, follow the game, and are engrossed in the absorbing interest of pursuit, while the hunter warms his hands, keeps up his spirits, and waits as patiently as he can for the chance of a shot. It not unfrequently happens that the fox takes a course of his own and disappears early in the day with the dogs on his track, leaving the hunter to cultivate that philosophy which Socrates is reputed to have domesticated among men. On the other hand, there are clear, bracing days when the game comes within range with the most considerate promptness, and the brush is the symbol of an experience whose zest none but the lover of sport can adequately appreciate.

There is a large class of men in the Adirondacks to whom the winter months bring the real work of the year, a work of much hardship even under the most favorable circumstances. As one drives along the roads in some sections of the woods he comes not unfrequently upon the deserted log-houses that have served as lumber camps. In winter these rude but warmly built huts are centres of the greatest activity. A camp generally numbers from twenty to thirty men, mostly French-Canadians, with some admixture of the native woodsmen. The season of work begins early in the au

tumn, when the trees are felled and cut into logs of uniform length. In this part of his work the Adirondack woodsman has exchanged the picturesque axe for the more manageable saw. The logs are then "skidded" by horses or oxen into skidways, which hold from one to two hundred. In the meantime, wood roads are made, and preparations are completed for the coming of snow. In December winter sets in, the roads are broken, and the logs are drawn to the nearest river, where they are piled in great roll-ways either on the ice or on a high bank, there to remain until the spring floods launch them and carry them to the various mills. The timber is often cut on the mountain sides, and the logs are shot down substantial slides built for that purpose. The descending logs in long slides attain such velocity that they sometimes shoot hundreds of feet through the air with the impetus of a cannon-ball. The life of the wood-cutters, although a hard one, is not without its enlivening features; indeed a vein of gayety runs through it. The French Canadians retain something of the cheerfulness of the Latin temperament, and in point of general good feeling and light-heartedness the lumber camp differs very sharply from the mining camp. Every hut contains at least one selfinstructed fiddler, and when the pipes are lighted for the after-supper smoke Kanuck songs shorten the long winter evenings. Hard work in the intense cold naturally promotes early retiring, and the twenty or thirty men are in their bunks at an hour when the evening has hardly begun for social purposes in more luxurious circles. One does not care to dwell even in thought on the quality of the air in those huts, hermetically shut against cold, and shared by such a company of sleepers. The wages earned by the wood-cutters vary from eighteen to twenty-five dollars a month, and in spite of their narrow quarters and coarse fare the health of the men is said to be uniformly good. The impression prevails that all cutting of timber is injurious to the forest; as a matter of fact, much of it is highly beneficial. There are lumbermen whose rapacity spares nothing and leaves behind it barrenness and devastation; there are

others whose intelligent management of their business conserves the woods by removing superfluous and dying trees. Some of these far-seeing men have studied the systems of forestry abroad, and are adapting them to the very different conditions of timber-cutting in our own forests. The spruce in the Adirondacks is dying rapidly, and its removal is a matter of the highest importance to the preservation of the woods. Proper legislative restrictions, with intelligence and vigilance on the part of the lumbermen, would make the business of woodcutting conservative of the public interests in this noble park.

Thoreau says that a broad margin of

leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. It is perhaps the most penetrating charm of winter life in the Adirondacks that it conveys a sense of the amplitude of nature and of man's life enfolded in it. One feels himself continually in the presence of a power so deep and great that all its processes are hushed into silence, and something of its own beautiful security enters into the soul. The stillness of the woods on a winter day, the vastness of the sky, the spaciousness of a snow-bound world allay the fever of life, calm the pulses of its unrest, and assure one that he too is part of this eternal order which nature keeps inviolate.

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Yet mothers kneel before thee still
Uplifting happy hearts; or, wild

With cruel loss, reach toward thy child
Void arms for the Christ-love to fill.

Time waits without the sacred spot

Where fair and young the mother stands;
Time waits, and bars with jealous hands
The door where years may enter not.

SQUIRE FIVE-FATHOM

T

By H. C. Bunner.

HERE had been a heavy rain the night before, and I was playing with sand and water in the deep trench between the road and the lower wall of my father's garden, and enjoying it as much as a boy of eight years can enjoy anything without the company of other boys. A swift stream of clear water rushed down this sandy gutter, and made for me a far-western river, on whose bank I was constructing a fort to defy the hostile Indians. I had selected a grassy promontory, jutting out into the stream, and had pulled all the grass out by the roots and levelled the earth, and was beginning on my fortifications, when I observed with alarm the dissolution of the point of my site, which, no longer held together by the fibrous grass roots, was rapidly turning into black mud and going down the current in a cloud.

I tried to stem the flood with a flat stone set on end; but it would not stay on end, and I was contemplating the necessity of a change of base for my military operations, when the end of a thick walking-stick was thrust between my face and the water, and I heard a tremulous, eager old voice cry earnestly: "Farther up-farther up, my lad

VOL. IV.-68

there-there where you have it now-set off the current ever so little-ay, that's it! Now build your sea-wallgood boy!"

I obeyed him mechanically, and in a few seconds saw the stream swirl off from my point, leaving it in a safe space of calm water. The Indians on the other shore must have felt gloomy forebodings.

I looked up. A tall, gaunt old gentleman, with a Roman nose and a delicate mouth, with deep wrinkles about it, as though he drew his lips together a good deal, stood and looked hard at the water. He did not look at me at all; but I looked hard at him-at his sad old face, his shabby brown broadcloth coat, the great rusty black satin stock about his neck, and his napless beaver hat with its rolling brim.

He stared at the water for a moment or two, gave an odd sort of half-choked sigh, and passed on his way.

That was the first time Squire FiveFathom spoke to me.

The town where I lived and fought Indians was called Gerrit's Gate. (For the benefit of a generation that pronounces Coney Island and Hoboken as they are spelled, that knows not oelykoeks, and that desecrates suppawn by calling it mush, let me say that Gerrit to the eye is Garrit to the ear.) The story of Gerrit's Gate is the story of Myndert Gerrit and his son, the old

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gentleman who helped me in my civilengineering.

Myndert Gerrit came from Schenectady to found the place. He was a rich man by inheritance, and he had more

"That was the first time Squire Five-Fathom spoke to me."

on

over inherited pride, ambition, and a high temper-a mental and spiritual outfit which put him sadly out of place in a conservative old midland town. I do not know just what was his quarrel with Schenectady; but I know he bought his square mile of "military lots" the shore of Lake Ontario with the avowed intention of building up a town that should be to Schenectady as a mountain to a hill-and that should incidentally outrival Rochester and Oswego. He said, and indeed it seemed, that the finger of heaven had pointed out the place.

As he stood on the hill to the southwest of his new purchase, Myndert Gerrit saw before him three wooded promontories stretching out into the lake-Near Point to the east, Far Point to the west, and Middle Point, shorter by half than its neighbors, nestling between them, and dividing a large bay into two snug harbors. Middle Point must have been, centuries ago, as long

as the others, but it had been fighting a slowly losing battle with the mighty current from the west that swept inward from Far and out again past the end of Near Point. This current made entrance to the western harbor difficult -even dangerous-but the eastern it was an easier matter to reach, and, once in, the largest ship on the lake could lie in safe water while the northwester went by Far and Near and the current hammered away at Middle, making a poor foot a year out of the firm, rootbound soil. And at the head of this little haven the land lay in a low plateau, forming a natural levee.

Here came Myndert Gerrit, in 1822, with his only son (he was a widower) and his whole household, including ten free negroes, formerly his slaves. The son was then a man of thirty, unmarried and devoted in all things to his father. They were constant companions, and as far as I could learn, they cared little for other society. Gerrit reserved the high eastern promontory for his own mansion. He laid the foundation that year, while he and his people lived in log-cabins. During the summer he surveyed the level land, and staked it out for streets. In the fall he went to New York, and he returned the next spring, leading a caravan of some twenty families, and bringing with him the machinery for a saw-mill and a grist-mill. It was a long and tiresome journey: a great labor of transportation; but, by water and by wagon, they made it in about a month.

Laborers came from neighboring villages (or rather settlements) and ground was broken without delay. They cut a good road running two miles to the eastward, where it opened up a branch of Gravelly River, which gave them flatboat navigation to the line of the Grand Canal, as they called the Erie, at that time within a year or two of completion.

The mansion on Near Point was finished in September, and the two Gerrits went to live in it. Standing at his west window late one afternoon, he looked out and saw a sight that filled him with pride. Middle Point was shorn of every tree, and bristled only with surveyor's stakes. Only the great gaps in the earth showed where the twisted roots

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"Myndert Gerrit saw before him three wooded promontories stretching out into the lake."

had been, and these were growing into larger holes, that marked the sites of houses to be. Up in the streets back of the levee a few light structures had already arisen. Two or three temporary docks stretched out into the quiet blue waters of the harbor. Myndert Gerrit looked longest at Middle Point, now a low table of land with water on both sides. A street-or what was to be a street-ran down its middle, from the water to where, at the mainland, it joined the great road that stretched away through the woods to the river-to the great world-to trade and life and fortune.

wind of the north; your house shall be taken from you, and in a little while you shall have no part or lot in this home of your own choosing-save in six feet of earth above your face.

That night Myndert Gerrit heard the northwester come roaring down from the Canada forests; but he paid no heed to it. He had heard it many a night before. It might knock at his headland gates till it wearied, for all he cared.

But the next morning at five o'clock, his son, looking pale and frightened, came to his bedside, and told him he must go at once to the town-so they called it already. He dressed himself and hastened to Middle Point, and there he found all the towns-people gathered. They stood in little knots, or wandered about trying to make out the full extent of the damage. Their faces were pale, and showed ghastly in the gray and doubtful light. A chill of alarm and apprehension had seized them. They looked suspiciously and almost resentfully at the old man and his son. What had these two men brought them to?

"Now," he said to his son, "my part is done. I have made all ready for them. Now we may begin to look for returns." Ay, Myndert Gerrit, your part is done, and it was done when you uprooted the first tree and dug the first well on Middle Point. Look from your window to-day in the red fall sunset, and see if you can, in your fancy, the town of your love and hope. See the glister of the evening sun on the low roofs of houses, on steeple and spire rising se- Myndert Gerrit saw his great mistake renely above them! See it redden the with his eyes, but his heart at first rechimneys of homes and set its dazzling fused to accept the truth. He was like blaze in the window-panes. Hear, if a man who sees death for the first time, you can, in your thought, the sound of knows it is death, and yet cannot make people moving about the streets, of chil- it real to his own mind that the blood dren's voices at play, of clanking anvils, will no more flow in the cold veins, that of horses' feet on the roadways, of the heart shall not beat again; that creaking cordage and flapping canvas breath and life have gone out together. where your laden ships lie at their docks At first he went about bravely, showing with their white sails emblazoned by the the people how a jetty here, and a dyke warm light of the west! See it-hear it there, and a sea-wall in a third place -be glad of it in the pride of your would put all to rights; but even before heart: rejoice in the town in which you his hearers had seen that the remedy have sunk all your wealth and the heri- was far beyond any means that they tage of your son! For when you wake possessed, he himself knew that the to-morrow you will awake from a dream, danger to come was not to be met by your returns shall be water and the any scheme of his devising. The greater

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