From the northeastern bastion of Crown Point a covered way leads to the lake, and here a well was sunk ninety feet deep for a water supply. Tradition told of vast treasures concealed by the French, and so excited did the people become that a joint-stock company was formed to search for them, clearing out the well and making excavations, but nothing was found but some lead and iron. The ruins are in lonely magnificence to-day, the red-thorn bushes brilliantly adorning them, and the place is a popular picnic-ground. From the northern ramparts there is a magnificent view of the distant Green Mountains on the right hand, with their gentle fields and meadows stretching down to the lake, and the rugged Adirondack foothills on the left, the distant dark mountain ranges looming far away behind them, with the huge broad-capped "Giant of the Valley" standing up prominently. Gazing at their sombre contour, the reason can be readily divined why the Indians called this vast weird region Cony-a-craga, or the "Dismal Wilderness." The higher Adirondack summits, composed of the hardest granite, are said by the geologists to be the oldest land on the globe and the first showing itself above the universal waters. Some distance above Port Henry is Westport Landing, the village standing in the deep recesses of Northwest Bay, where the long ridge of Split Rock Mountain, stretching towards the northeast, makes a high border for the bay. This curious ridge is of historical interest. The outer extremity is a cliff thirty feet high, covering about a half-acre, and separated from the main ridge by a cleft twelve feet wide cut down beneath the water. This cliff was the ancient Rock Reggio, named from an Indian chief drowned there, and was for a long time the boundary between the New York Iroquois and the Canadian Algonquins, whose lands were held respectively by the English and the French. It is mentioned in various old Colonial treaties as fixing the boundary between New York and Canada, but during the Revolution the Americans passed far beyond it, conquering and holding the land for seventy-seven miles northward to the present national boundary.
THE GREEN MOUNTAINS.
Above, the lake gradually broadens, and at the widest part are seen, on opposite sides, the village of Port Kent with its furnaces, and the flourishing Vermont city of Burlington. The great Adirondack ridge of Trembleau runs abruptly into the water as a sort of guardian to Port Kent, and just above, Ausable River flows out through its sandy lowlands into the lake. Vermont, which makes the entire eastern shore of Champlain, is a region of rural pastoral joys with many herds and marble ledges, a land of fat cattle and rich butter-firkins, overlooked by mountains of gentle slope and softened outline. Southward from Lake Champlain is Bennington, in a mountain-enclosed valley, near which was fought in August, 1777, the famous battle in which Colonel John Stark's Green Mountain boys cut off and signally defeated Baum's detachment of Burgoyne's army. It is now a flourishing manufacturing town. East of the head of Lake Champlain is Rutland, the centre of the Vermont marble-quarrying industry and the site of the great Howe Scale Works, a city of twelve thousand people. Three-fourths of the marble produced in the United States comes from this district of Vermont, and the Sutherland Falls Quarry at Proctor, near Rutland, is said to be probably the largest quarry in the world. These quarries are in the flanks of the Green Mountains which stretch northward, making the watershed between the upper Connecticut River and Lake Champlain. The Killington Peak, forty-two hundred and forty feet high, is not far from Rutland.
Mansfield, the chief of the Green Mountains, is behind Burlington, and rises forty-three hundred and sixty-four feet. Seen from across the lake, it presents the upturned face of a recumbent giant, the southern peak being the "Forehead," the middle one the "Nose," and the northernmost and highest the "Chin." The latter, as seen against the horizon, protrudes upwards in most positive fashion, rising three hundred and forty feet higher than the "Nose," about a mile and a half distant. This decisive-looking Chin is thus upraised about eight hundred feet from the general contour of the mountain, while the Nose is thrust upward four hundred and sixty feet, its nostril being seen in an almost perpendicular wall of rock facing the north. Mansfield is heavily timbered until near the summit, and a hotel is perched up there at the base of the Nose, both Nose and Chin being composed of rock ledges, which have been deeply scratched by boulders dragged over them in the glacial period. These Green Mountains extend down from Canada, and terminate in the Taghkanic and Hoosac ranges of Berkshire in Massachusetts. They do not attain very high elevations, the Camel's Hump, south of Mansfield, rising forty-one hundred and eighty-eight feet. This was the "Leon Couchant" of the earliest French explorers, and it bears a much better resemblance to a recumbent lion than to a camel's back. The western slopes of these mountains are chiefly red sandstone, while their body and eastern declivities are granite, gneiss and similar rocks, and they are filled with valuable mineral products, marbles, slates and iron-ores. Their slopes have fine pastures of rich and nutritious grasses, and the green and rounded summits present a striking contrast to the lofty, bare and often jagged peaks of the White Mountains of New Hampshire beyond them. There are cultivated lands on their slopes, at an elevation as high as twenty-five hundred feet, and in and about them are the forests producing the dear, delicious maple sugar:
"Down in the bush where the maple trees grow,
There's a soft, moist fall of the first sugar snow;
And the camp-fires gleam,
And the big kettles steam,
For the maple-sugar season has arrived, you know;
And these are the days when you'll find on tap