We were sitting on the sand looking off over the blue water veiled with the soft haze of Indian summer. A point covered with pine trees stretched boldly out into the lake, its rocky cliffs rising perpendicularly eighty feet above the beach, a sheer precipice from whose summit a pebble dropped would strike the water below. On the west a stream came rippling over the stones between bluffs high and massive enough for a deep rapid river--bluffs of wild majesty worn into varied outlines, as though a mighty torrent had once surged between them, forcing the very rocks to crumble before its headlong career. But now only a gentle stream wandered through the broad bed, here shallow over the sand, there darkling in a still pool, now making a green willow-shaded island, and now a deep rock-bordered channel, doing its best with the various graceful devices of a happy little stream to compensate for the absence of the river, to whose former existence the cliffs bore silent witness and the pines testified in sighing lamentations all the day long. On the east the lake swept inland in a gradual curve to the piers and wharves of a city with a cloud of smoke hanging above its spires, and then outward again to a wooded point twelve miles away, the eastern boundary of the bay. Looking north, we could see only water, apparently as deep as the ocean: no land was visible on the Canadian horizon, no island to break the harmony--nothing but vessels sailing gayly toward the east or tacking patiently toward the west, some distinct and snowy, others dark in the distance, and all with the graceful rigging peculiar to the lake-craft. Although November was far advanced, the warm sunshine and soft breeze gave no indications of approaching winter: the leaves had fallen from the trees and lay in brilliant heaps upon the ground, and children running through the groves waded in their glowing masses and tossed them high in the air with many a shout and half-finished song. The bare branches basked motionless in the hazy warmth, and the brown and empty farm-lands expanded their broad breasts to the heat, the care of the crops well over, the last sheaf safely housed and their labors ended. Nature works hard in these Western fields, conquering them from the forest, redeeming them from the swamp and tending the delicate grain amid the rank growth of prairie-grass; but when the last load is driven home and the last leaf has fallen, then she rests, and the hazy atmosphere and peculiar stillness mark her repose. Indian summer! what is it? It is Nature's _dolce far niente_, her one holiday. Wise will he be who, working with her through the dreary winter, the budding spring, yes, and even the sultry summer, earns the right to rest with her in Indian summer, the vacation of the year.