Piseco.
It is not long since that Hamilton County, with the whole region lying between the fertile slopes of the Mohawk and Lake Champlain, was known but as a vast, mountainous, cold tract, presenting the extreme contrast of a primeval forest, traversed only by the hunter of the deer, the bear, and the moose, Here and there an agricultural settler along its borders snatched a scanty harvest from the brief summer, and on the eastern side the lumberman pursued his wintry toil; but, once past the log-cabin of the one or the shanty of the other, it was literally a howling wilderness, where the yell of the wolf, the scream of the panther, and the laughter of the owl mingled with the roar of floods and the moanings of the winds through the tall hemlocks. Now the marvellous beauty of its scenery, more wildly grand than any other in North-America, diversified by many lakes of crystal purity and their foaming outlets, have been so often eloquently described by adventurous littérateurs in search of the picturesque, trout, and copy-money, that a tour through Racquette and the Saranac is getting to be well-nigh as readily undertaken as a trip to the Upper Nile. Even ladies have ventured a day or two within the shadows, and before long the solitary Indian, who lingers in the hunting-grounds of his fathers, or the moccasined woodsman, paddling his "birch," will be startled by flotillas gay with fashionable drapery, and listen, in wondering delight, to the songs of Verdi and Auber among the echoes of Blue Mountain. Lines of rival railways have already been traced through the gorges and along the streams; speculation has been busy with the timber-lots, and soon the glory of the forest, unbroken
