Yes, where was Claud? At the risk of the charge of purposely tantalizing the reader, we must break off here, to follow the young man just named, in the unexpected adventures which he also had experienced during that eventful day. But for this we will take a new chapter.
CHAPTER VI.
"To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,
Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er, or rarely, been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean,—
This is not Solitude: 't is but to hold
Converse with nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd."
It was about the middle of the forenoon, on the day marked by the incidents narrated in the preceding chapter, when Claud Elwood, who had become pretty well initiated into the sports of the locality, entered his light canoe, with his fishing-tackle and fowling-piece, and pushed out upon the broad bosom of the forest-girt Umbagog. Having had the best success, when up on the lake the last time, on the western margin, he pulled away in that direction, and, after rowing a couple of miles up the lake, he laid down his oar, unrolled his elm-bark cable, and let down his stone anchor, at a station a furlong or so from the shore.
It was a beautiful spot, and a beautiful day to enjoy it in. From the water's edge rose, deeply enshrouded in their bright green, flowing, and furbelowed robes of thickly interwoven pines, the undulating hills, back to the summit level of that long, narrow tongue of forest land, which, for many miles, only separates the Umbagog from the parallel Magalloway, the noble stream that here comes rushing down from the British highlands, to join the scarcely larger Androscoggin, almost at the very outset of its "varied journey to the deep." Turning from this magnificent swell on the west, the eye, as it wandered to the right over the bright expanse of intervening waters, next rested on the long, crescent-shaped mountain ridge, behind which slept, in their still deeper and wilder seclusion, the broad Mooseeluk-maguntic and the Molechunk-a-munk, which, with the Umbagog, make up the three principal links in this remarkable chain of lakes. Still farther to the right lay the seemingly boundless, rolling forests, forming the eastern and southern rim of this basin of the lakes; whose gradually sloping sides, like some old pinnacled city, were everywhere bristling with the giant forms of the heaven-aspiring pine, and whose nearer recesses were pierced, in the midst, by the long, lessening line of the gleaming Umbagog; while around the whole circle of the horizon, scattered here and there far back into the blue distance, rose mountain after mountain in misty grandeur to the heavens.
After thus slowly sweeping the horizon, to note, for the tenth time, perhaps, the impressive character of the scenery, whose everywhere intermingling beauty and grandeur he was never tired of contemplating, Claud withdrew his gaze, and turned his attention to, the more immediate object of his excursion. After a few moments spent in regulating his hook and line, he strung his angle-rod, and threw out to see whether he could succeed in tempting, at that unfavorable hour, the fickle trout from their watery recesses. But all in vain the attempt. Not a trout was seen stirring the water at the surface, or manifesting his presence around the hook beneath; and all the endeavors which the tantalized angler made, by changing the bait, and throwing the line in different directions around him, proved, for the next hour, equally fruitless. While he was thus engaged, intently watching his line, each moment expecting that the next must bring him a bite, one of those peculiar, subdued, but far-reaching sounds, which are made by the grazing of the oar against the side of the boat in rowing, occasionally greeted his ear from some point to the south of him; though, for a while, nothing was to be seen to indicate by whom the sounds were produced. Soon, however, a man in a canoe, who had been coasting, unseen, along the indentures of the shore, and whom Claud instantly recognized as Phillips, the hunter already named, shot round a neighboring point, and, in a few minutes more, was at his side.
"Well, what luck?" cheerily exclaimed Phillips, a keen, hawk-eyed, self-possessed looking man, with a round, compact, and sinewy frame. "What luck to-day, young man?"
"None whatever," replied Claud, with an air of disappointment.
"I suppose so, unless you began before ten o'clock."
"But why did you suppose so?"