The excitement of the hunt had brought me back to a natural state of feeling, and now, as I lay in the stern of the boat, drifting slowly down-stream, and looked up into the hazy blue sky, in the whole expanse of which appeared no fragment of cloud, and the softened sunshine penetrated both soul and body, while the brain, lulled into lethargy by the unbroken silence and monotony of forest around, lost every trace of its midsummer madness,--I looked back to the state of the last evening as to a curious dream. I asked myself wherein it differed from a dream, and instantly my daemon replied, "In no wise." The instant reply surprised me, without startling me from my lethargy. I responded, as a matter of course, "But if no more than a dream, it amounts to nothing." It answered me, "But when a man dreams wide awake?" I pondered an instant, and it went on: "And how do you know that dreams are nothing? They are real while they last, and your waking life is no more; you wake to one and sleep to the other. Which is the real, and which the false? since you assume that one is false." I only asked myself again the eternal question, "Objective or subjective?" and the daemon made no further suggestion. At this instant we heard the report of a gun from the lake. "That's the Doctor's shot-gun," said Steve, and pulled energetically down-stream; for we knew, that, if the Doctor had fired, the deer had come in,--and if he had missed the first shot, he had a second barrel, which we should have heard from. Among the most charming cascades in the world is certainly that which Bog River makes where it falls into Tupper's Lake. Its amber water, black in the deep channel above the fall, dividing into several small streams, slips with a plunge of, it may be, six feet over the granite rocks, into a broad, deep pool, round which tall pines stand, and over which two or three delicate-leaved white-birches lean, from which basin the waters plunge in the final foamy rush of thirty or forty feet over the irregularly broken ledge which makes the bold shore of the lake. Between the two points of rock which confine the stream is thrown a bridge, part of the military road from the Mohawk settlements to those on the St. Lawrence, built during the war of 1812. On this bridge I waited until Steve had carried the boat around, when we reembarked for the camp.