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the base, and the noise of the rushing seems to cool the summer hour, in which you slip and clamber about the stones. Cooper loved this place, and it is mentioned in some of his novels; which particular ones, of course, the discerning and remembering reader recalls, and quotes the passages to his friend, the wit, as they all climb again to the top of the stage.

Then under a tree you are shown where Jane M'Crea was murdered. Ask no more. Is it not enough, that under a tree, by savage Indians, a girl was slain? In that bright summer hour of liberty, with the music of last

night's Saratoga dance beating in your memory, and the moon getting ready to rise over Lake George before you, do you wish more material for romance?

If you do, look! There is Horicon; there is the Lake of the Sacrament. It lies like a floor of azure air among soft hills; the skittle-ground of fairies. nymphs, elves, and water-spirits.

The first impression of Lake George has all this tenderness and delicacy. The poet at your side will murmur, "Let us call it Lake of the Virgin," and the delighted wit will surely exclaim, How beautiful it is. by George!"

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You descend toward the lake, and behold the village of Caldwell. The village of Caldwell is not beautiful, but it is only a kind of convenience for visitors to the lake. You have nothing to do with it; your business is at the back of the hotel upon the water. The village was named, in 1810, from a gentleman who owned a great deal of land in the vicinity. It might have been named a hundred years ago, for it is a most venerable baby of a town; very small, but very old in the face. It never grows, and has no occasion to grow. The commerce of Lake George will not be extensive; the pleasure travel is only a summer episode in the life of the town: it offers no special

advantages or attractions to settlers. It has no shops as good as Stewart's; the opera is indifferent-frogs in the early spring, and tree-toads later; and the youth of the neighborhood fancy that New York offers a more promising career for young men.

It is, in fact, not a romantic town; more decidedly not a romantic town than most other towns; and yet, which of us, when he has heard in his hopeful and inexperienced years of "Caldwell, Lake George," has not had a vision of beauty floating before his fancy?

And here we were right; only the romance is entirely in the Lake George, and not in the Caldwell.

So now survey the lake.

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It is thirty-three miles long, and dotted with islands. The local tradition," that inveterate Munchausen that invests every famous place, informs us, that there are three hundred and sixty-five islands in the lake. We might believe the story, if "local_tradition" only had the ingenuity of variety in its fabrications. It says with the same assurance, that there are three hundred and sixty-five drives in certain places, a road for every day in the year, and so forth, until "local tradition" has made itself a common laughing-stock.

The greatest breadth of the lake is four miles; but two miles is the average width. It is some two hundred and twenty-five feet above Lake Champlain, and about three hundred above tide-water. The bottom of the lake is a plain of yellow sand; and so transparent is the water, that you can look down fifty feet, as you lean over the side of the boat in which you seem to hang suspended between a rarer and denser atmosphere. For the air among the mountains of Lake George shares the purity of its water. Far across, upon the shore, you see what seems to be not half a mile away, but it is really more than the mile; and mountains which lie just beyond you, and which you are going to skip up, to enjoy the view, laugh your fatigue to scorn, long before you have reached their feet.

You must learn betimes that there is witchery in this air and water, and if you would view Lake George aright, you need not visit it by the pale moonlight, but you must give yourself up to the spirit of moonlight, which is a spirit of romance and quiescence. If the mountains woo you, you must understand that they will toy with you, and coquette as never belle coquetted. They will wrap themselves in mist, and drench you with it; they will lead you into pitfalls and caves, and break your legs over stones and stumps; they will heat you to a fever, and fret you to a fury, as you pursue them; they will make you vow never to trust mountains again; never to carry game-pouch or portfolio with any hope of recompense; they will even infect you with doubts of their beauty, and cause you to shout in mockery at the romantic fool Endymion, who loved the moon, and you, the ridiculous Smith, who loved a mountain;

when, suddenly, in the very crisis of your parched despair, the great mountain will toss a trickling rill of perfect water at your feet, and, as you stumble, blinded and weary in the midst, lift the vapor gently before your eyes, and show you the soft, shadowy perspective of land and water, the plains of heaven, the rosy reaches of eternal peace, and you will forget your pain, your anger, and your weariness; you will repent of your impatient fury, and love mountains forever.

Fort George stands upon a little hill, about half way between the shores at the head of the lake, and, perhaps, a quarter of a mile from the water. It is built of a dark limestone found near by. This fort has no especial historical association; but its neighbor, Fort William Henry, half a mile off, has a melancholy interest.

In 1757, Lord Loudon, Governor of Virginia, was the British commander-inchief in North America. He was op

posed by the Marquis de Montcalm, the French Generalissimo, and, two years afterward, Wolfe's courtly foe at Quebec. The French had planted themselves at Ticonderoga, at the junction of Lake George and Lake Champlain, and, as the lakes were the chief channel of communication between Canada and the provinces, it was of the greatest importance to each party to hold them. So the able Montcalm resolved to capture Fort William Henry, which was held by the English, at the head of Lake George; and, leaving Ticonderoga on St. Patrick's Eve, he suddenly appeared before Fort William Henry on "St. Patrick's Day, in the morning," ," of the year 1767.

The able Montcalm burned several boats and buildings, but the British did not yield; and, having lost the day, but not at all disheartened, he fell back upon Ticonderoga.

General Webb, whose headquarters were at Fort Edward, several miles from the Lake, was chief in command of the British forces at the Lake, and seems to have been a worthy subordinate of Loudon, lazy, contemptuous, cowardly, perhaps, and certainly careless.

He came to Fort William Henry with an escort, commanded by Major Putnam-a name that was to be made famous in the military history of the country-and Webb sent Putnam with eighteen men down the lake to recon

noitre the enemy. The major found them swarming in great profusion at the other end of Lake George, and begged Webb to allow him to attack them. But General Webb was afraid somebody might be hurt, so he retired to Fort Edward, and sent Colonel Munroe with a regiment to command the garrison at William Henry.

Montcalm, meanwhile, had collected nine thousand soldiers, and two thousand Indians, and embarked for the head of the lake, where he landed about a mile north of the Lake House at Caldwell, and, planting his powerful batteries, summoned the garrison to surrender.

Colonel Munroe had less than three thousand men to defend the fort; but he confidently expected reinforcements from General Webb, and kept up heart.

Montcalm, a hero and a gentleman, again summoned Munroe to surrender, and told him that, while he was sure of taking the fort, he preferred to avoid a bloody battle. Colonel Munroe, who

could not believe in the utter incompetency and cowardice of General Webb, who lay at Fort Edward with four thousand men, refused to yield, and the siege began.

Munroe sent expresses to Webb, and that doughty warrior ordered Putnam and his rangers to march to the relief of Fort William Henry; but when the rangers were about three miles away, he dispatched a messenger to recall

them, and wrote a letter to Munroe advising him to surrender.

Montcalm had been alarmed by the reports he heard of a large force on its way to relieve the garrison, but when, instead of falling into the hands of the terrible Putnam, this letter of Webb's fell into his, the Marquis smiled, and blazed away at the fort for six consecutive days. While the siege lasted, the great guns of the fort burst, ammunition failed, there was no help from the cowardly and lazy Webb, and Munroe capitulated.

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Montcalm gave him honorable terms, but the Frenchman could not control his savage allies. As the English troops marched out of the fort, the wild Indians fell upon them, especially upon the Indians who had fought with them, and a bloody butchery began. along the road, among the mountains, as they dragged wearily on toward Fort Edward, they were pitilessly murdered, fifteen hundred of them. Professor Silliman states in his "Tour" that the French tried to repress this savage fury. Let us hope so. We may be sure Montcalm did try. But the slaughter was terrible; and the massacre of Fort William Henry is the darkest stain in the history of Horicon.

The fort was leveled by Montcalm. It is now only a cluster of grassy mounds. The brave marquis marched away to other victories, and also to be himself surprised upon the heights of Quebec, to fall mortally wounded at the same time with his heroic foe, General Wolfe; to express his admiration of the valor and discipline of his opponents; to die before midnight of the day of his last and greatest defeat; and to be buried, at his own desire, in a cavity of the earth, formed by the bursting of a bomb-shell.

Victories are too costly that are achieved by the death of such men. As Wolfe floated down the river in the starlight the night before his attack, he repeated Gray's elegy, then recently published. He is said to have declared that he would rather have written that poem than take Quebec upon the

morrow. Grahame says that he must have repeated that line,

"The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

He and Montcalm were at that very moment treading those paths--and the poet told the truth.

Your mind will be very busy with the remembrances of these old French and English wars, as you lie upon the soft grass at Fort George and Fort William Henry, the summer clouds scattering over your head like smoke-wreaths. But war seems to you a fable. The silent shores around you, which look as secluded as if no one but a chance Indian had ever wandered over them, are historic ground.

The United States Hotel is near Fort George a good house: in fact, you are well off anywhere with the lake before your windows. At Caldwell everybody used to stay at Sherrill's Lake House. It is a good, old, easy place. The trav

eler wore it in his journey like an old shoe. Some families even passed the summer there; but it had only a view across the lake, and you wondered every time you looked why a hotel was not built at the proper head of the lake.

That wonder was, probably, father to the Fort William Henry Hotel, which stands upon the battle ground, and is a genuine American caravanserai. During the last year it has been very much lengthened and improved, and can now accommodate five hundred persons. It has some three hundred and fifty rooms; is lighted with gas, and is supplied with water to the roof, from mountain springs. You may be sure of kind treatment and good fare, while you are the guest of the William Henry; and when you have driven all the lovely drives about the head of the lake, and walked the various walks, and dreamed away the days among the grassy ruins of the fort-when you

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have boated and bathed, and fished and bowled, until you wish to see Ticonderoga, and cannot stay any longer, then you will embark upon the new and pretty steamer fitly named the Minnehahalaughing water-and make your path of travel where the fleets of the hostile armies passed.

Last year the steamer John Jay was burned. She was the fourth pleasuresteamer upon the lake. Unless Champlain sailed into it from his own lake, no boat ever floated upon the Horicon but the Indian canoe; and after the great war, which has made its shores so famous, there was no further navigation until the year 1815. Since then, the James Caldwell, the Mountaineer, the William Caldwell, and the John Jay, have carried the summer travelers across the lake. Now comes the pretty Minnehaha, which was launched on a bright May-day with smiles and festivity, and, as we step on board of her, let us hope that those auspices may herald a smiling career; that a thousand happy young hearts may remember her pleasant deck; that the low words, which are breathed over her railings for none but one to hear, may be as sweet and pure as the water beneath, and the air around; and that, on that gay steamer on that calm lake, a thousand Minnehahas may consent to make a music as of laughing water in a thousand homes, and a thousand lovers hereafter remember Lake George, as the lake of the sacra

ment.

If you are alone on the steamer, shout these lines, and hear the multitudinous music of the mountain-echo:

"In the land of the 'Dacotas,'
Where the falls of Minnehaha
Flash and gleam among the oak-trees,
Laugh and leap into the valley-
There the ancient arrow-maker
Made his arrow-heads of sandstone-
Arrow-heads of chalcedony-
Arrow-heads of flint and jasper,
Smoothed and sharpened at the edges,
Hard and polished, keen and costly.
With him dwelt his dark-eyed daughter,
Wayward as the 'Minnehaha,'

With her moods of shade and sunshine,
Eyes that smiled and frowned alternate,
Feet as rapid as the river,
Tresses flowing like the water,
And as musical a laughter,
And he named her from the river,
From the water-fall he named her
'Minnehaha,'' laughing water.'"

We are beginning the tour of those supposititious three hundred and sixtyfive islands. Here, for instance, is Teaisland, or T.-island. It is a lovely, bowery isle, and in the rustic summerhouse you can pass many a solitary musing hour, provided that everybody else who wishes to muse in solitude has not started a little earlier, and is already dreaming. You go to this island in a boat from Caldwell. Let it be toward sunset, with tranquillity in the air, and shifting gleams of splendor upon the water. It is a ludicrous pity, to be sure, to have twenty other people, all desiring to enjoy, without company, the same spectacle, and all floating about in their

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