He said to me later, and emphatically, "I must kill a deer;" and one night we went out "jack-hunting" to enable him to realize that ambition. This kind of hunting, as most people know, is a species of pot-hunting, much employed by the hunters for the market, and so destructive to the deer that it is now forbidden by the law in all the Adirondack country. The deer are stalked by night along the shores, where they come in to feed, the hunter carrying in his boat a light so shaded that it illuminates only the space directly in front of the boat, the glare blinding the animal so that he does not see the boat or the boatman. In this way the deer may be approached within a few yards if the paddler is skillful; but as he stands perfectly still, and is difficult to see in the dim light, the tyro generally misses him. We paddled up to within twenty yards of a buck, and the guide gave the signal to shoot; but Emerson could see nothing resembling a deer, and finally the creature took fright and ran, and all we got of him was the sound of galloping hoofs as he sped away, stopping a moment, when at a safe distance, to snort at the intruders, and then off again. We kept on, and presently came upon another, toward which we drifted even nearer than to the first one, and still Emerson could see nothing to distinguish the deer from the boulders among which he stood; and we were scarcely the boat's length from him, when, Emerson being still unable to see him, and not caring to run the risk of losing him, for we had no venison in camp and the luck of the morning drive was always uncertain, I shot him. We had no other opportunity for the "jack-hunt," and so Emerson went home unsatisfied in this ambition,--glad, no doubt, when he recalled the incident, that he had failed. The guides--rude men of the woods, rough and illiterate, but with all their physical faculties at a maximum acuteness, senses on the alert and keen as no townsman could comprehend them--were Emerson's avid study. This he had never seen,--the man at his simplest terms, unsophisticated, and, to him, the nearest approach to the primitive savage he would ever be able to examine; and he studied every action. When the dinner was over, and the twilight coming on, he sometimes asked me to row him out on the lake to see the nightfall and watch the "procession of the pines," that weird and ghostly phenomenon I have before alluded to.