a revelation of the power of sight!  That faint blue outline far in the north was Lyon Mountain, nearly thirty miles away as the crow flies.  Those silver gleams a little nearer were the waters of St. Regis.  The Upper Saranac was displayed in all its length and breadth, and beyond it the innumerable waters of Fish Creek were tangled among the dark woods.  The long ranges of the hills about the Jordan bounded the western horizon, and on the southwest Big Tupper Lake was sleeping at the base of Mount Morris.  Looking past the peak of Stony Creek Mountain, which rose sharp and distinct in a line with Ampersand, we could trace the path of the Raquette River from the distant waters of Long Lake down through its far-stretched valley, and catch here and there a silvery link of its current.

But when we turned to the south and east, how wonderful and how different was the view!  Here was no widespread and smiling landscape with gleams of silver scattered through it, and soft blue haze resting upon its fading verge, but a wild land of mountains, stern, rugged, tumultuous, rising one beyond another like the waves of a stormy ocean,—­Ossa piled upin Pelion,—­Mcintyre’s sharp peak, and the ragged crest of the Gothics, and, above all, Marcy’s dome-like head, raised just far enough above the others to assert his royal right as monarch of the Adirondacks.

But grandest of all, as seen from this height, was Mount Seward,—­a solemn giant of a mountain, standing apart from the others, and looking us full in the face.  He was clothed from base to summit in a dark, unbroken robe of forest.  Ou-kor-lah, the Indians called him—­the Great Eye; and he seemed almost to frown upon us in defiance.  At his feet, so straight below us that it seemed almost as if we could cast a stone into it, lay the wildest and most beautiful of all the Adirondack waters—­Ampersand Lake.

On its shore, some five-and-twenty years ago, the now almost forgotten Adirondack Club had their shanty—­the successor of “the Philosophers’ Camp” on Follensbee Pond.  Agassiz, Appleton, Norton, Emerson, Lowell, Hoar, Gray, John Holmes, and Stillman, were among the company who made their resting-place under the shadow of Mount Seward.  They had bought a tract of forest land completely encircling the pond, cut a rough road to it through the woods, and built a comfortable log cabin, to which they purposed to return summer after summer.  But the civil war broke out, with all its terrible excitement and confusion of hurrying hosts:  the club existed but for two years, and the little house in the wilderness was abandoned.  In 1878, when I spent three weeks at Ampersand, the cabin was in ruins, and surrounded by an almost impenetrable growth of bushes.  The only philosophers to be seen were a family of what the guides quaintly call “quill pigs.”  The roof had fallen to the ground; raspberry-bushes thrust themselves through the yawning crevices between the logs; and in front of the sunken door-sill lay a rusty, broken iron stove, like a dismantled altar on which the fire had gone out forever.