Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/459

404 fills one with pity and wonder—the utter silence and loneliness of it. It is a dead sea, but neither bitter nor barren.

I could not help the feeling, that increased as time passed, that this pure eye of water, ringed by one distinct line of dark trees, no farther horizon visible, was not on a plain, but on a high mountain. Later on, as we sailed around the borders of the lake, another delusive thought persisted in coming. It always seemed that the wooded shore rose abruptly thirty yards or so back from the water, and that I verily could see the uplifting of the trees and underbrush. Probably because it was unnatural that the shore should be just as low or lower than the water surface, the senses refused to accept it as true.

The first deep impression made on me by the lake was its size. I had expected to see a sheet not a tenth part as large, and gloomy with the shadows of its tall, overhanging trees. Instead, from the centre the trees were a low, dark border on the far horizon.

From the centre, the lake is the very ideal of loneliness and stillness, strangely emphasized by the solitary wide-winged hawk, tipping on his high circle. No smaller bird can be seen at this distance in the trees on the shore—though birds are there, and in rich variety.