At the head of these valleys, in the basin of the Ausable Lakes and on the surrounding slopes of the most interesting group of mountains in the Adirondacks, a great tract of forest has been preserved. Giant, Noonmark, Colvin, and the Gothics raise their splendid ridges and summits to the enclosing horizon, and Dix, Haystack, and Marcy, the last the highest mountain of the Adirondack range, are within a day's walk of the little community that used to be known as "Beede's." Where the Ausable Club's picturesque golf-course is now laid out, the fields of Smith Beede's farm then surrounded his primitive, white-painted hotel. Half a mile to the eastward, in a patch of rocky pasture beside Giant Brook, stood the original Beede farm-house, and this Henry P. Bowditch, Charles and James Putnam, and William James had bought for a few hundred dollars (subject to Beede's cautious proviso in the deed that "the purchasers are to keep no boarders"). They had adapted the little story-and-a-half dwelling to their own purposes and converted its surrounding sheds and pens into habitable shanties of the simplest kind. So they established a sort of camp, with the mountains for their climbing, the brook to bathe in, and the primeval forest fragrant about them. With a friend or native guide,--or often alone, with a book and lunch in his light rücksack,--James would go off for a long day's walk on one of the mountain trails. He liked to start early and to spend several hours at mid-day stretched out on the sheltered side of an open ridge or summit. In this way he would combine a day of outdoor exercise with fifty to eighty pages of professional reading, the daily stint to which he often held himself in his holidays. In the summer of seventy-eight he planned to combine this sort of refreshment with work on the "Psychology." The plan seemed a little innocent to at least one friend,--Francis J. Child,--who said in a letter to James Russell Lowell: "William has already begun a Manual of Psychology--in the honeymoon;--but they are both writing it." _To Francis J. Child._ [Dictated to Mrs. James] KEENE VALLEY, _Aug. 16_ [1878].