Slight As It Was, It Appeared To Us A Very
Broadway To Paradise If Broad Ways Ever Lead Thither.
Phelps hailed
it and sank down in it like one reprieved from death.
But the boat?
Leaving him, we quickly ran a quarter of a mile down to the inlet.
The boat was there. Our shout to the guide would have roused him out
of a death-slumber. He came down the trail with the agility of an
aged deer: never was so glad a sound in his ear, he said, as that
shout. It was in a very jubilant mood that we emptied the boat of
water, pushed off, shipped the clumsy oars, and bent to the two-mile
row through the black waters of the winding, desolate channel, and
over the lake, whose dark waves were tossed a little in the morning
breeze. The trunks of dead trees stand about this lake, and all its
shores are ragged with ghastly drift-wood; but it was open to
the sky, and although the heavy clouds still obscured all the
mountain-ranges we had a sense of escape and freedom that almost
made the melancholy scene lovely.
How lightly past hardship sits upon us! All the misery of the night
vanished, as if it had not been, in the shelter of the log cabin at
Mud Pond, with dry clothes that fitted us as the skin of the bear
fits him in the spring, a noble breakfast, a toasting fire,
solicitude about our comfort, judicious sympathy with our suffering,
and willingness to hear the now growing tale of our adventure.
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