linear, distinctly traced on the brown ground or upon the gray rock. In these fine curves and strokes of dendritic scripture a graceful sylvan idyl might perchance be deciphered by the curious. But the dense masses of laurel and the darkling company of pines cloaked themselves in their encompassing gloom, in these bright days as ever, and in their shade the dank smell and the depressing chill attested the winter. Vague shimmers hung about the mountains, blue in the distance, garnet and brown and black close at hand. The terrible heights and unexplored depths, the vast, sheer, precipitous descents, the titanic cliffs, the breadth, the muscle, the tremendous velocity of the torrents hurling down the gorges, gave august impressions of space unknown to the redundant richness of the summer woods. There were vistas of incomparable amplitude, as still, with the somnolent sunshine and the sparse shadow, as if they were some luminous effect on a canvas, painted in dark and light browns, graduated through the tints of the sere leaf in ascendant transition to the pale gold of the sunbeams; affording, despite the paucity of detail, an ecstasy to the sense of color. It was a moment of preëminent consequence to Harshaw one day, when far up a stately avenue a deer appeared with the suddenness of an illusion, yet giving so complete a realization of its presence that the very fullness and splendor of its surprised eyes left their impression. Then, as in some jugglery of the senses, the animal with consummate grace and lightness, vanished, bounding through the laurel. The wind was adverse and the hounds did not readily catch the scent. A few tentative, melancholy yelps of uncertainty arose; then a deep, musical, bell-like bay, another, and the pack opened with a great swelling, oscillating cry, that the mountains echoed as with a thousand voices, and in a vast compass of tone. The mounted men, hallooing to one another, dashed off in different directions, making through the woods towards various “stands” which the deer might be expected to pass. Now and then the horn sounded to recall the stragglers,—inexpressibly stirring tones, launched from crag to crag, from height to height; far-away ravines repeated the summons with a fine and delicate mystery of resonance, rendered elusive and idealized, till one might believe that never yet did such sound waves float from the prosaic cow-horn of the mountaineer.