The excursion had been so satisfactory that when the whole company had come together again, in the autumn, at Cambridge, the formal organization of the Club was called for, and to the number of those who had been at Camp Maple there was a large accession of the most prominent members of the intellectual society of Boston and Cambridge. It was decided to purchase a tract in the Adirondack Wilderness, the less accessible the better, and there to build a permanent club-house, and I was appointed to select the site and lay it out. The meeting was late in the autumn, and the winter had set in with heavy snow before I had my orders. I caught a severe cold at New York,--a trivial matter to notice, but one which very narrowly escaped the gravest consequences to me; for the cold became aggravated to a bronchial attack, disregarding which I pushed on into the Wilderness, and drove from the settlements in to the Saranac in a storm, facing a northwesterly wind which, filling the air with a cold fog as penetrating as the wind, crystallized on every tree and twig, and made the entire forest, as far as the eye could reach, like a forest of frosted silver. It was a spectacle for a lifetime, and has never been offered to me again; but I reached Martin's, where we had to put up, dangerously chilled. Next day, however, I had all the guides of the neighborhood in for consultation as to a certain tract which I had fixed on from report and general knowledge of the region, and we planned a survey in the snow. It was fourteen miles from any house to the lake I had fixed on,--that known as the Ampersand Pond; but, fortunately, there were, amongst the guides called in, some who had been assistants in the official survey, and, with their practical knowledge and memory of the lines, I was enabled, without leaving the inn, to draw a map of the section of a township which included the lake, and determine its exact position, with the fact that it had been forfeited to the State at the last tax sale, and was for sale at the land office in Albany. We bought the entire section, less 500 acres, taxes on which had been paid, for the sum of $600,--thus securing for the Club a tract of 22,500 acres. My cough was increasing alarmingly, and, when I consulted a physician at New York, he advised me to get home and to bed as quickly as I might; so, returning to Boston, I called together the executive committee of the Club to dinner, made my report, drank a glass of champagne to the future lodge, and went to bed in the early stages of pneumonia, which kept me prostrate six weeks.