abounds in green and scarlet lizards, which would be a serious drawback to the pleasures of the fastidious. I asked Peter many questions concerning his adventures about this lake, and he told me that the number of “harmless murders” which he had committed here were two or three hundred. In one day, he shot three deer; at another time, a dozen turkeys; at another, twenty ducks; one night, an old bear; and again, half a dozen coons; and, on one occasion, annihilated a den of thirty-seven rattlesnakes. This will give you some idea of the stories which I hear from this man; but you cannot conceive the peculiar enjoyment they afford me: it is because they are associated with my “boyhood’s home,”—my wilderness home, in my much-loved Michigan. At nine o’clock, we lighted a torch and went to examine our lines; and it was my peculiarly good fortune to haul out not less than forty-one trout, weighing from one to two pounds a-piece. Now, if this wasn’t sport, I should like to know what is? These we put into a spring of the coldest water I ever tasted, and then “laid down in our loneliness,” as Coleridge would have said on the occasion. Branches of hemlock constituted our couch, and my station was between Peter and White Yankee. Little did I dream, when I first saw these two bipeds, that I should ever have them for my bedfellows. But who, alas! can always have the bedfellow he desires? Think you that we could not sleep soundly in that lap of the forest, between the sheltering rock and the roaring fire? Yea, my friends were in the land of Nod in less than a dozen minutes; but it was hard for me to go to sleep, tired as I was, in the midst of such a scene. There I lay, flat upon my back, a stone and my cap for a pillow, wrapt up in my blanket, with nothing but my nose and eyes exposed to the chilly night air. Oh! what pictures did my fancy conjure up, as I looked upon the army of trunks around me, glistening in the fire-light. One moment they were a troop of Indians from the spirit-land, come to revisit again the hunting-grounds of their fathers, and weeping that the white man had desecrated their soil; and again, I fancied them to be a congress of wild animals, assembled together to try, execute, and devour us, for the depredations our fellows had committed upon their kind for the last one hundred years. By and by, a star peered upon me from between the branches of a tree, and my thoughts ascended heavenward. And now, my eyes twinkled and blinked in sympathy with the star, and I was a dreamer.