I wish you were up here with me, Polly; I am sure you would forget all your troubles. It is such an extraordinary experience to be in a primeval wilderness, where one never hears a church bell, never comes suddenly upon a wayside calvary, never passes a peasant in costume, nor a picturesque hovel. The civilisations and the arts that have made Europe such an inexhaustible wonder never have ventured here. It is Nature, virgin and ignorant, and it often gives me the most unaccountable sensation. Perhaps when I am more familiar with it, I shall be more successful in defining it. I have not grasped the spirit of the place yet. There is nothing of the frowning majestic awesomeness of wild mountain regions that I have read of and often imagined, and, as surely, there is nothing of the peace of England--that peace that must pervade any perfected civilisation just as repose comes to the truly cultivated mind of middle years. It is something between the two, beauty without tameness, solitude without calm, yet with none of the feverish restlessness of the young civilisation at its feet, primeval wildness without its terrors; for scarcely a living thing that harms, human or brute, but has been exterminated; noble heights that never frown. There you have the Adirondacks as I am able to interpret them to you at present. They give me an intense pleasure, that is all I can add. As we approached the mountains on the day of our arrival I thought I should be disappointed, the foliage looked so _soft_. From a distance one could not define a single tree; they are so densely limbed and leafed, their branches grow so low, and they crowd so closely, that the mountains looked as if covered by a thick shrubbery, through which a path never had been cut, and out of which not a tree projected. But after we were in the mountains all was changed, we drove through the very heart of the woods, thick with high trees and full of a pleasant gloom; and once in approaching them we passed a hill that looked to be set close with green church spires, so thick were the spruce among the maples. The trees about the lake grow down to the edge of the brown water, almost out of it, and so densely, that in rowing past, one rarely has a glimpse into the woods. When one does, it is to see the great boulders that have given the lake its name. They, too, are on the edge of the lake, covered with moss that sometimes is green, sometimes a mingling of the most delicate tints, pink and green and pearl and blue. Rioting everywhere along the edge of the lake is the wild honeysuckle, pink and intoxicatingly fragrant. By the Club House is an open field where they raise hay. Just now it looks like a wild lawn full of buttercups and daisies, almost as much of an anomaly up here in this wilderness as these comfortable houses and gaily painted boats.