Whereupon he buys a couple of pairs of ancient
weather-bleached horns from some colonist, and, nailing them
up at impossible angles on the wall of his city-den, humbugs
brother-Cockneys with tales of _venerie_, and has for life his
special legend, "How I shot my first deer in the Adirondacks."
The Adirondacks provide a compact, convenient, accessible little
wilderness,--an excellent field for the experiments of tyros. When the
tyro, whether shot, fisherman, or forester, has proved himself fully
there, let him dislodge into some vaster wilderness, away from guides
by the day and superintending hunters, away from the incursions of the
Cockney tribe, and let out the caged savage within him for a tough
struggle with Nature. It needs a struggle tough and resolute to force
that Protean lady to observe at all her challenger.
It is well to go to the Adirondacks. They are shaggy, and shagginess
is a valuable trait. The lakes are very well,--very well indeed. The
objection to the region is not the mountains, which are reasonably
shaggy,--not the lakes and rivers, which are water, a capital element.
The real difficulty is the society: not the autochthonous
society,--they are worthy people, and it is hardly to be mentioned as
a fault that they are not a discriminating race, and will asseverate
that all fish are trout, and the most arrant mutton is venison,--but
the immigrant, colonizing society.
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