The old man sat under his Dutch _stoup_, smoking his pipe, and suffered us to tie our ponies to his fence without stirring; and in answer to our inquiries if there was a boat on the lake, simply nodded an assent, and pointed to the water’s edge. Whether this indifference to strangers is indolence merely, or whether Herr Barhydt does not choose to be considered an inn-keeper, no one is enough in his secrets to divine. He will give you a dram, or cook you a dinner of trout, and seems not only indifferent whether you like his fish or his liquor, but quite as indifferent whether and what you pay him. In his way, Herr Barhydt is kind and courteous. We descended to the lake, and after pulling up to the upper extremity where the view is taken, we returned to partake of the old Dutchman’s hospitality, and have a little conversation with him. Among other things, we asked him if he was aware that he had been put in a book. “I’ve hearn tell on’t,” said he; “a Mr. Wilkins, or Watkins, has writ something about me, but I don’t know why. _I never did him no harm as I know on._” We had not the book to show the injured old gentleman his picture, but as it happens to lie by us now, and really contains a very literal description of the spot, we will copy out the extract:— “Herr Barhydt is an old Dutch settler, who, till the mineral springs of Saratoga were discovered some four miles from his door, was buried in the depth of a forest unknown to all but the prowling Indian. The sky is supported above him, (or looks to be,) by a wilderness of straight columnar pine-shafts, gigantic in girth, and with no foliage except at the top, where they branch out like round tables spread for a banquet in the clouds. A small ear-shaped lake, sunk as deep into the earth as the firs shoot above it, and clear and unbroken as a mirror, save the pearl-spots of the thousand lotuses holding up their cups to the blue eye of heaven, sleeps beneath his window; and around him in the forest, lies, still unbroken, the elastic and brown carpet of the faded pine-tassels, deposited in yearly layers since the continent first rose from the flood, and rotted a foot beneath the surface to a rich mould that would fatten the Symplegades to a flower-garden. With his black tarn well stocked with trout, his bit of a farm in the _clearing_ near by, and an old Dutch Bible, Herr Barhydt lived a life of Dutch musing, talked Dutch to his geese and chickens, sung Dutch psalms to the echoes of the mighty forest, and, except on his far-between visits to Albany, which grew rarer and rarer as the old Dutch inhabitants dropped faster away, saw never a white human face from one maple-blossoming to another.