We returned to camp before the sun went behind the hills, with our fish ready for the pan, and our boatmen provided us with a meal of jerked venison, pork, and trout, which an epicure might envy, and to which a hard day’s journey and an appetite sharpened by the bracing influence of the pure mountain air, gave a peculiar relish.  It was a pleasant thing to see the moon come up from among the trees that formed a dark outline to the lake away off to the east, and travel up into the sky; to see how faithfully it was given back from down in the stirless waters, and how the stars twinkled and glowed around it in the depths below, as they did in the depths above.  There was the moon, and there the stars, all bright and glorious in the heavens above; and there another moon, and other stars, as bright and glorious, down in the vault below; the lake floating, as it were, an almost viewless mist, a shadowy and transparent veil between.  As we sat, in the greyness of twilight, in front of our tents, a curious sound came over the lake from the opposite shore, so like civilization that it startled us for a moment.  Here we were, fifty miles from a house, away in the forest beyond the sound of anything savoring of human agency, and yet we heard distinctly what was for all the world like the blows of an axe or hammer upon a stake, driving it into the earth.  It had the peculiar ring, which any one will recognise who has driven a stake into ground covered with water, by blows given by the side instead of the head of an axe.  These blows were given at intervals so regular, that we all suspended smoking, certain that there were other sportsmen beside ourselves in the neighborhood of this lake.

“Who in the world is that?” asked Smith, of Martin, who seemed to enjoy our astonishment.

“That,” replied Martin, “is a gentleman known in these parts as the ‘Pile-driver.’  He visits all these lakes in the summer season, and though, as a general thing, he travels alone, yet he sometimes has half a dozen friends with him.  If you’ll listen a moment, may be you’ll find that he has a friend in the neighborhood now who will drive a pile in another place.”

Sure enough, in a moment the same ringing blows came from a reedy spot in a different part of the bay.

“The bird that makes that noise,” said Martin, “is about the homeliest creature in these woods.  It is a small grey heron, that lights down among the grass and weeds to hunt for small frogs and such little fish as swim along the shore.  When he drives his pile, he stands with his neck and long bill pointed straight up, and pumping the air into his throat, sends it oat with the strange sound you have heard.  It is the resemblance of the sound to that made by driving a stake into ground covered with water, that gives him his name.  He’s an awkward, filthy bird, but he helps to make up the noises one hears in these wild regions.”

“My first thought was,” said Smith, “that we had got among the spirits of the woods, and that they were ‘rapping’ their indignation at our presence, there was something so human about it.”