awakened my companion, and we seated ourselves upon the topmost rock, which was nearly bare of shrubs, but covered with a rich moss, softer and more beautiful than the finest carpet. But how can I describe the scene that burst upon our enraptured vision? It was unlike anything I had ever seen before, creating a lone, lost feeling, which I supposed could only be realized by a wanderer in an uninhabited wilderness, or on the ocean, a thousand leagues from home. Above, around and beneath us, ay, far beneath us, were the cold bright stars, and to the eastward the “young moon with the old moon in her arms.” In the west were floating a little band of pearly clouds, which I almost fancied to be winged chariots, and that they were crowded with children, the absent and loved of other years, who, in a frolic of blissful joy, were out upon the fields of heaven. On one side of us reposed the long broad valley of the Hudson, with its cities, towns, villages, woods, hills and plains, whose crowded highway was diminished to a narrow girdle of deep blue. Towards the south, hill beyond hill, field beyond field receded to the sky, occasionally enlivened by a peaceful lake. On our right a multitudinous array of rugged mountains lay piled up, apparently as impassable as the bottomless gulf. In the north, old High Peak, King of the Catskills, bared his bosom to the moonlight, as if demanding and expecting the homage of the world. Strange and magnificent, indeed, was the prospect from that mountain watch-tower, and it was with reluctance that we turned away, as in duty bound, to slumber until the dawn. The dawn! and now for a sunrise picture among the mountains, with all the illusive performances of the mists and clouds! He comes! he comes! “the king of the bright days!” Now the crimson and golden clouds are parting, and he bursts on the bewildered sight! One moment more, and the whole earth rejoices in his beams, falling alike as they do upon the prince and the peasant of every land. And now, on either side and beneath the sun an array of new-born clouds are gathering—like a band of cavaliers, preparing to accompany their leader on a journey. Out of the Atlantic have they just arisen; at noon, they will have pitched their tents on the cerulean plains of heaven; and when the hours of day are numbered, the far-off waters of the Pacific will again receive them in its cool embrace. Listen! was not that the roar of waves? Naught but the report of thunder in the valley below. Are not the two oceans coming together? See! we are on a rock in the midst of an illimitable sea, and the tide is surely rising—rising rapidly! Strange! it is still as death, and yet the oceans are covered with billows! Lo! the naked masts of a ship, stranded on a lee shore!—and yonder, as if a reef were hidden there to impede their course, the waves are struggling in despair, now leaping to the sky, and now plunging into a deep abyss! And when they have passed the unseen enemy, how rapid and beautiful are their various evolutions, as they hasten to the more distant shore! Another look, and what a change! The mists of morning are being exhaled by the rising sun, already the world of waters is dispersed, and in the valley of the Hudson, far, far away, are reposing all the enchanting features of the green earth.

We descended the mountain by a circuitous route, that we might enjoy the luxury of passing through Plauterkill Clove. The same spring that gives rise to Schoharie Creek, which is the principal tributary of the Mohawk, also gives rise to the Plauterkill. In its very infancy, it begins to leap and laugh with the gladness of a boy. From its source to the plain, the distance is only two miles, and yet it has a fall of twenty-five hundred feet; but the remainder of its course, until it reaches the Esopus, is calm and picturesque, and on every side, and at every turn, may be seen the farm-houses of a sturdy yeomanry.

The wild gorge or dell through which it passes, abounds in waterfalls of surpassing beauty, varying from ten to a hundred feet in height, whose rocks are green with the moss of centuries, and whose brows are ever wreathed with the most exquisite of vines and flowers. Here is the double leap, with its almost fathomless pool, containing a hermit trout that has laughed at the angler’s skill for a score of years; the fall of the Mountain Spirit, haunted, as it is said, by the disembodied spirit of an Indian girl, who lost her life here while pursuing a phantom of the brain; and here is the Blue-bell Fall, forever guarded by a multitudinous array of those charming flowers. Caverns, too, and chasms are here, dark, deep, chilly and damp; where the toad, the lizard and snake, and strange families of insects, are perpetually multiplying, and actually seeming to enjoy their loathsome lives; and here is the Black Chasm, and the Devil’s Chamber, the latter with a perpendicular wall of twice the height of old Trinity, and with a wainscoting of pines and hemlocks which have “braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze.” Plauterkill Clove is an eddy of the great and tumultuous world, and in itself a world of unwritten poetry, whose primitive loveliness has not yet been disfigured by the influence of Mammon. It has been consecrated by a brotherhood of friends, well-tried and true, to the pure religion of Nature; and after spending a summer-day therein, and then emerging under the open sky, their feelings are always allied to those of a pilgrim in a strange land, passing through the dreamy twilight of an old cathedral.

But it is time that I should change my tune, as I desire to record a few fishing adventures which I have lately experienced among the Catskills. My first excursion was performed along the margin of Sweetwater Brook, which flows out of the lake already mentioned. My guide and companion was a notorious hunter of this region, named Peter Hummel, whose services I have engaged for all my future rambles among the mountains. He is, decidedly, one of the wildest and rarest characters I have ever known, and would be a valuable acquisition to a menagerie. He was born in a little hut at the foot of South Peak, is twenty-seven years of age, and has never been to school a day in his life, nor, in his travels towards civilization, further away from home than fifteen miles. He was educated for a bark-gatherer, his father and several brothers having always been in the business; but Peter is averse to common-place labor, to anything, in fact, that will bring money. When a boy of five years, he had an inkling for the mountains, and once had wandered so far, that he was found by his father in the den of an old bear, playing with her cubs. To tramp among the mountains, with a gun and dog, is Peter’s chief and only happiness. He is, probably, one of the best specimens of a hunter now living; and very few, I fancy, could have survived the dangers to which he has exposed himself. As to his constitution, he seems to be one of those iron mortals who never die with age and infirmity, but who generally meet with a sudden death, as if to recompense them for their heedlessness. But with all his wildness and recklessness, Peter Hummel is as amiable and kind-hearted a man as ever breathed. He is an original wit withal, and shrewd and very laughable are many of his speeches, and his stories are the cream of romance and genuine mountain poetry.

But to my story. As usual, we started on our tramp at an early hour, he with a trout-basket in his hand, containing our dinner, and I with my sketch-book and a “pilgrim staff.” After a tiresome ascent of three hours up the side of a mountain, over ledges, and through gloomy ravines, we at last reached the wished-for brook. All the day long were we cheered by its happy song, as we descended; now leaping from one deep pool to another, and now scrambling over green-coated rocks, under and around fallen trees, and along the damp, slippery sides of the mountains, until we reached its mouth on a plain,