Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/183

 Lahc Winnifiscog-ec in October.

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��LAKE WINNIPISEOGEE IN OCTOBER. By Fred Myron Colby.

��" He it was whose hand in Autumn Tainted all the trees with scarlet, Stained the trees with red and yellow."

Six years ago, near the noon of a mild October day, the writer first stepped on board the dainty '■' Lady of the Lake," one of the small steamers that ply between the places of interest on the shores of Winnipiseogee, and from its forward upper deck first enjoyed the glorious view of the lake from The Wiers, the tree-crowned islands dotting its surface, the undu- lations of the sweeping shores, and all those attractive features so often descrilied by tourists, and which Ed- ward Everett declared rivalled all he had seen " from the Highlands of Scotland to the Golden Horn of Con- stantinople, from the summits of the Hartz Mountains to the Fountain of Yaucluse." Since then my footsteps have wandered almost yeai-ly to this mountain lake, set like a gem in the heart of New Hampshire ; but of all my annual pilgrimages none has given me greater satisfaction than the first. My other visits have been made in June, or in August, during the hot midsummer days. To see the lake in its glory, it should be visited in the fall. The sedative influence and peculiar quiet of the scene during the charming days of an Indian sum- mer, with the bright tints of an autumnal foliage, graduating to the soft haze of the mountain blue, re- flected in its waters, are most wonder- ful and enchanting. Then, indeed, the lake is most worthy of its aborigi- nal name— "The Smile of the Great Spirit."

��With one foot upon the very out- skirts of civilization, and the other pressing the unreclaimed forest that stretches dark and unbroken north- wards. Lake Winnipiseogee forms the connectino; link between man and nature, a link that, is naturally a quaint and curious compound of both extremes, where one may at will solace himself with all the comforts and delicacies that man's art can pi'o- cui'e ; or, turning his face northward and forestward, plunge all at once into solitude so dense and unbroken that lie can, with scarcely an effort, fancy himself the solitary discoverer of a new and hitherto unknown woi-ld. The cultivation is limited around the immediate borders of the lake. Scai'cely are the surroundings less wild than they were in 16o2, when Captains Edward Johnson and Simon Willard carved their initials, which are still visible, on the Eudicott rock near its outlet. The straggling par- ties of Indians, who pass by it now on their way to trade with the visitors at the great hotels in the cities and among the mountains, see it but little more civilized in expression than their forefathers did, whose wigwams, be- fore New Hampshire felt the white man's foot, spotted the meadows of the Merrimack below, —

" Where the old smoked in silence their pipes, and the young

To the pike and the white perch their baited lines flung;

Where the boy shaped his arrows, and where the shy maid

Wove her many-hued baskets and bright wam- pum braid."'

And yet in no way is it a sense of seclusion amid the forests, of being

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