My Adirondack experiences and studies having excited the desire on the part of several Cambridge friends to visit the Wilderness, I made up a party which comprised Lowell and his two nephews, Charles and James Lowell (two splendid young New Englanders afterwards killed during the Civil War), Dr. Estes Howe, Lowell’s brother-in-law, and John Holmes, the brother of Oliver Wendell, considered by many of the Cambridge set the wittier and wiser of the two, but who, being extremely averse to publicity, was never known in literature.  We made a flying journey of inspection through the Saranac Lakes and down the Raquette River to Tupper’s Lake, and then across a wild and at that day a little explored section to the head of Raquette Lake, and down the Raquette River back to the Saranacs; the party returning home and I back to the headwaters of the Raquette to spend the summer painting.  I built a camp on a secluded bay, which still bears my name amongst the men of the section, and there I worked in a solitude sometimes complete and sometimes shared by my guide, who passed his time between the camp and the settlement at Saranac, whence I drew all my supplies beyond those which the lake and the forest furnished us with.  The solitude of the Wilderness at that time can be no longer found anywhere in the vast woodland which, much mutilated and scarred by fires and clearings, still covers the district between the springs of the Mohawk and the rivers which empty into the St. Lawrence.  There was one settler on the lake, from whom I could, when necessary, get a loaf of bread, but the solitude for nine days out of ten was not broken by a strange footfall.  My camp was a shelter of bark, raised on poles, open in front to the morning sun, just sufficing to shed the rain, while my bed was a layer of the branches of the fir-trees that grew around.  Trout from the lake, broiled on the coals of the camp-fire, with a piece of bread, was the usual and sufficient fare, though we now and then killed a deer when Steve, my guide, was with me; at other times the dog was my only company, and in this monotonous life I found the most complete content that my experience has given me.  Here wolves abounded, but only on one occasion did they attempt to disturb me, which was when I had left by the lake shore a deer we had killed in the morning, and they came at night to steal the meat.  Bears were abundant, but even shyer than the wolves; and though we heard, now and then, the cry of a panther (puma), we never saw one.

Here the morbid passion of solitude grew on me.  The serene silence was seldom broken save by the cry of an eagle or an osprey, high overhead, the chirping of the chickadee flitting about the camp to find a crumb, or the complaining note of the Canada jay, most friendly of all wild birds, seeking for the scraps of venison we used to throw out for him.  No other birds came to us, and one of the most striking features in the Wilderness was the paucity of bird life and