I am sorry to confess that I did not get up that morning until breakfast was ready. Jack did not complain, but I saw by his quiet smile that some kind of an apology was necessary.
“Jack, I’m as stiff as a clotheshorse, and sore from head to foot.”
“Why,” he asked, “didn’t you dig holes for your hips and shoulders, as the Indians do?”
“The holes were all made, only they were in the wrong places.”
After breakfast, we broke up our camp and rowed over to Fourteen Mile Island. On the way we had another view of Bolton, behind us, and the countless islands in the Narrows, through which we were shortly to sail. The little village of Bolton lies on the western shore opposite Fourteen Mile Island. It contains a hotel, several boarding-houses, a pretty little P. E. church, and a forest of flags, every house seeming to have its own staff. One of the islands, near Bolton, was shown us as the point of view from which Kensett’s picture of the Narrows was painted. At Fourteen Mile Island we found a
quiet little hotel, which serves as a dining-place for excursionists from Caldwell. A few regular boarders seemed to be enjoying themselves, and I noticed an artist’s easel and umbrella on the porch.
We soon left with a good supply of butter, eggs, milk, and fresh bread. After rowing a few miles through the maze of islands in the Narrows, one of which is occupied by a hermit artist named Hill, a “transcendentalist,” the wind arose, and we sailed under the shadow of Black Mountain through the wildest portion of the lake. On the western shore, savage cliffs were piled in utter confusion, now rising, like the Hudson River Palisades, in solid walls above a mass of débris, now hanging in gigantic masses over the crystal abyss below. On the eastern shore, Black Mountain rises above any other height on the lake, and the view which we beheld as we passed from Fourteen Mile Island down the Narrows is one of the finest in the world. Now we were drifting under the cliffs at the base of the mountain, and, looking up its abrupt sides—a series of rocky spurs covered principally with hemlocks and cedar—we saw two eagles soaring above the thin clouds which floated half-way up. Throughout this portion the lake varies from one to two miles in width.
Oh! what a cozy little nest in the hills at the northern end of Black Mountain! A few farms, and a sleepy old mill that looks as if it never was made to run, lie on the sunny slope retiring into the hills which forms a pass over to Whitehall. No wonder they call it the “Bosom!”
Here, in a little graveyard, we saw the tombstone of a Revolutionary soldier, and the old farm-house, at which we stopped for dinner, with its loom and spindle and bustling old housewife, formed a good specimen of that
phase of American life which is rapidly passing away for ever.