What a change! and would that this old traveller could revisit the Delaware to-day. My boat is free again and the mists are gone. Through the trees are sifted the level sunbeams. There is at least a chance now to compare notes. The forest is now a field, the trackless marsh a meadow; wild life is largely a thing of the past; silence, both day and night, replaces sound. No, not that; but only the minor sounds are left. There are still the cry of the fish-hawk and the sweet song of the thrush. No stags now swim the river, but there remain the mink and the musk-rat. It has not been long since I saw a migration of meadow-mice, and at night, I am sure, many an animal dares to breast the stream, a mile wide though it be. Too cunning to expose itself by day, it risks its life at night; and how tragic the result when, nearly at the journey’s end, it is seized by a lurking foe; dragged down, it may be, by a snake or a turtle! The world is just as full of tragedy as ever, and, let us hope, as full of comedy. In a bit of yonder marsh, above which bends the tall wild rice, there is daily enacted scene after scene as full of import as those which caused the very forest to tremble when the wolf and panther quarrelled over the elk or deer that had fallen. It has been insisted upon that a goal-less journey is necessarily a waste of time. If on foot, we must keep forever on the go; if in a boat, we must keep bending to the oars. It is this miserable fallacy that makes so many an out-door man and woman lose more than half of that for which they went into the fields. Who cares if you did see a chippy at every turn and flushed a bittern at the edge of the marsh? If you had been there before them, and these birds did the walking, you would have gone home the wiser. It is not the mere fact that there are birds that concerns us, but what are they doing? why are they doing it? This the town-pent people are ever anxious to know, and the facts cannot be gathered if you are forever on the move. Suppose I rush across the river and back, what have I seen? The bottom of the boat. I came to see the river and the sky above, and if this is of no interest to the reader, let him turn the leaf. Does every storm follow the track of the sun? As the sun rose there were clouds in the east and south and a haziness over the western sky. Had I asked a farmer as to the weather probabilities, he would have looked everywhere but due north. Why does he always ignore that quarter? There may be great banks of cloud there, but they go for nothing. “Sou-east” and “sou-west” are forever rung in your ears, but never a word of the north. Sometimes I have thought it may be for this reason that about half the time the farmer is all wrong, and the heaviest rains come when he is most sure that the day will be clear.