The next morning we ascended Tahawas, but saw nothing save whirling clouds on its summit. Twice since then we have had better fortune, and looked down from this mountain peak, five thousand three hundred and forty-four feet above the sea, upon the loveliest mountain landscape that the sun ever shone upon. We went down the western slope of Tahawas, through a driving rain, to Camp Colden, where, with clothes hung up to dry, we looked like a party of New Zealanders preparing dinner, hungry enough, too, to make an orthodox meal of each other. The next day the weather cleared up, and we made a trip of two miles over a rough mountain trail to Lake Avalanche, whose rocky and precipitous walls form a fit christening bowl, or baptistery-font for the infant Hudson. Returning to Camp Colden and resuming our western march, two miles brought us to Calamity Pond, where a lone monument marks the spot of David Henderson's death, by the accidental discharge of a pistol. Five miles from this point brought us to the "Deserted Village," or the Upper Adirondack Iron Works, with houses and furnaces abandoned, and rapidly falling into decay. Here we found a cheery fireside and cordial welcome. * * * All the sad story of forest and flower, All the red glory of sunsetting hour, Comes till I seem to lie lapped in bright dreams Lulled by the lullaby murmur of streams. _James Kennedy._ * * * Had I time to picture this level, grass-grown street, with ten or fifteen square box-looking houses, windowless, empty and desolate; a school-house with its long vacation of twenty-three years; a bank with heavy shutters and ponderous locks, whose floor, Time, the universal burglar, had undermined; two large furnaces with great rusty wheels, whose occupation was gone forever; a thousand tons of charcoal, untouched for a quarter of a century; thousands of bricks waiting for a builder; a real haunted house, whose flapping clap-boards contain more spirits than the Black Forests of Germany--a village so utterly desolate, that it has not even the vestige of a graveyard--if I could picture to you this village, as it appeared to me that weird midnight, lying so quiet, "under the light of the solemn moon," you would realize as I did then, that truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and that Goldsmith in _his_ "Deserted Village" had not overdrawn the description of desolate Auburn.