It was nearly noon of that morning of the departures--a cloudless, glorious morning, the sun just warming the chill of the Notch to a pleasant May air, and not a fleck of mist to dim the view of the peaks on the very extreme verge of the line of vision, when Horace Townsend strolled down the half mile of road northward from the Profile, to Echo Lake, intent upon entering on those mysteries which specially belong to that haunted little sheet of water--the mysteries of the boat, the horn, and the cannon. He was alone, as he had been from the first moment of his coming to the Notch, except as the newly-formed intimacy between Halstead Rowan and himself had temporarily drawn them together. He seemed to have formed no other new acquaintance, but that was to be, perhaps, formal and distant; and there was no certainty that the incident would not add to rather than take away from any feeling of positive loneliness which had before oppressed him. As he turned down the by-road shooting sharply away to the right, with the Lake glimmering silver in the sunlight through the trees, there was a great crash of sound, a deafening reverberation from the rocks of Eagle Cliff, hanging immediately over the Lake, a fainter following, and then another and another, dying away among the far-off hills in the infinite variety of the highland echo. There were already visitors at the Lake; and the factotum who blended the triple characters of keeper, guide, and boatman, had been discharging the little old cannon on the wharf, as a crowning proof to some party with whom he was just finishing, of the capacity of _his_ lake for dwarfing all the travelled ones' recollections of Killarney and the Echo Rocks of Superior.