Once more in the green wilderness! Welcome the wild scenes of our boyhood, which, as the checkered panorama of the past is unrolled at our bidding, rise on the mental vision in all their original freshness and beauty! It was here we first essayed to study the works of nature, and in them trace the Master-hand that moulded and perfected them. It was here we learned to recognize the voice of God in the rolling thunder, and his messengers in the swift-winged lightnings; to mark the forms of beauty and grandeur in every thing, from the humble lichen of the logs and rocks, to the high and towering pine of the plain and the mountain,--from the low murmurings of the quiet rivulet, to the loud thunderings of the headlong cataract,--and from the soft whisperings of the gentle breeze, to the angry roar of the desolating tornado; and, finally, it was here that our first and most enduring lessons of devotion were learned, here that our first and truest conceptions of the grand and beautiful were acquired, and here that the leading tone of our intellectual character, such as it may be, was generated and stamped on us for life. The second part of our story, to which the preceding chapters should be taken, perhaps, as merely introductory, opens about midsummer, and among that remarkable group of sylvan lakes--nearly a dozen in number--which, commencing on the wild borders of northerly New Hampshire, and shooting off in an irregular line some fifty miles northeasterly into the dark and unbroken forests of Maine, appear on the map, in their strangely shapeless forms and scattered locations, as if they must have been hurled, by the hand of some Borean giant, down from the North Pole in a volley of huge ice-blocks, which fell and melted where they now lie, sparkling, like rough gems, on the shaggy bosom of the wilderness.