Our faces, however, must be turned eastward, and the following day found us again in our wagon, _en route_ for Placid Lake. To reach this, we left the return stage about two miles west of North Elba, and walked northward two miles through open country and some beautiful woodland, until we came out upon Bennet's Pond, on whose shore stands the pleasant farmhouse where we intended to pass the night. The owner and his family were absent, but we found a smiling little handmaiden, who brought us a cooling draught, and an antique whaler, who offered to show us the way to Lake Placid and give us a row. Placid Lake is a beautiful, clear sheet of water, about five miles long and two or three wide. It is divided down the centre by three islands, charmingly wooded. The surrounding mountains are high, and at the north-easterly end rises Whiteface, nearly, if not quite, 5,000 feet in height, the lower portion clad in deciduous trees, the middle in spruce, and the upper rising bare and white, with a great slide of many hundred feet extending from the top toward the lake, and marking out the steep pathway by which the ascent must be made. Bennet's Pond is about a mile and a half long, and half a mile broad. Bennet is a contraction of Benedict--Benedictus--Blessed--and never, surely, did blue expanse of limpid crystal better merit the appellation--Lake of the Blessed. Its shores are gently sloping, and beyond the nearer hills rise the giant summits of the highest peaks. These two sheets of water are within a quarter of a mile of each other, but have no communication, and are divided by a ridge of land, chiefly cleared, from whose top the view is as beautiful as any view from the same elevation to be obtained in America. To the north lies Lake Placid, with its shining waves, its islands, and the stately Whiteface; and to the south, the heaven-reflecting Lake of the Blessed, crowned by the noble dome of Tahawus, and his splendid retinue, Colden, McMartin, McIntire, Wallface, Dial Mountain, Nipple Top, and Moriah. To the east and west are wooded hills, completing the panorama, and enclosing a scene as enchanting as any single one the writer ever looked upon. The following day our host, who had meantime returned, drove us down through the Wilmington Pass to Upper Jay, and thence through Keene to the Keene Flats, a distance in all of between twenty and twenty-five miles.