There was no time to tarry, however attractive any spot might prove; and next in order, having seen the uplands, was to descend to the foot of the cliff and stroll along the beach. I was assured that Fortune favored us, as near by was a well-worn path. Never was a path better described—it was well worn. Smooth as a toboggan-slide and with few shrubs or sturdy weeds to seize in case of accident, my steps were clogged with fear; each foot weighted with a painful doubt. I hate to run a risk, and fear so strained my nerves that when the base was reached every muscle ached through sympathy. If we limit the localities to sand and water, the lake was an ocean on a small scale, and not a very small scale either. Sky and water closed in the earth’s boundary upon three sides; but the water lacked life. Not a shell, not an insect, not a fish had been tossed upon the sand—nothing but sand. This want was a disappointment, for the gathering of flotsam along our sea-coast is a never-ending source of pleasure. Perhaps, had there been recently a violent storm, I might have been more successful, but probably the water is too cold. On the other hand, it was a comfort to have land and water about one free from every trace of man’s interference. Thank goodness, there were no iron piers and hideous rows of booths and bath-houses! For aught one could see, the Indians might have left these shores but yesterday. Where we now strolled the cliff had been spared for several years, and a rank vegetation covered it from base to top. Squatty willows and dwarf sumachs, golden-rod and chess, a wild grass that recalled the graceful plumes of the _Panicum crusgalli_ at home; these held the winds at bay, but were likely, when next it stormed to be carried out to sea, and with them tons of the cliff upon which they grew. As so many of the rank growths near by were heavy with seed, it was and is an unsolved puzzle why there should have been a complete absence of birds. Everything that an ornithologist would say seed-eating birds required was here in profusion; yet the birds were not. Already the summer migrants had departed—I found many warblers’ and fly-catchers’ nests—and the winter birds of the region had not yet appeared. From what I saw this day and afterward in other localities, I am well convinced that, taking the year through, there is no spot, east of the Alleghanies, in the United States where birds are so abundant as in the valley of the Delaware. I have seen, since my return, more birds of many kinds in one half-hour at home than I saw during two weeks’ rambles in Canada.