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The primitive woods, mostly of birch with a sprinkling of spruce, put a high cavernous wall about the scene. How sweetly the birds sang, their notes seeming to have unusual strength and volume in this forest-bound opening! The principal singer was the white-throated sparrow, which we heard and saw everywhere on the route.

Here, despite their eagerness to reach their new camp, they were forced to stop and admire the great sheet of forest-bound water, smiling back the sky in tints of turquoise and pearl, dotted with apparently countless islets, like specks upon the face of a mirror.

The American settlers, perceiving the extreme danger of their English visitors, hastened to their relief, bringing with them a brass field-piece, which they turned against the assailants, who, terrified by so unaccustomed a mode of warfare, hastily retreated towards their forest-bound hamlet, leaving the English officer, his crew, and the Africans at liberty.

The canoes were slowly drifting northward, the thoughtful stars were glimmering in their mild glory over his head, and the forest-bound sheet of water lay embedded between its mountains, as calm and melancholy as if never troubled by the winds, or brightened by a noonday sun. Once more the loon raised his tremulous cry, near the foot of the lake, and the mystery of the alarm was explained.

About midway up the romantic glen of Cappercullen, near the point where the counties of Limerick, Clare, and Tipperary converge, upon the then sequestered and forest-bound range of the Slieve-Felim hills, there stood, in the reigns of the two earliest Georges, the picturesque and massive remains of one of the finest of the Anglo-Irish castles of Munster perhaps of Ireland.

Seated upon my raft and slowly carried by the current or drifted by the breeze, I had many a long, silent look into the face of the wilderness, and found the communion good. I was alone with the spirit of the forest-bound lakes, and felt its presence and magnetism.

It was within an hour of dusk none too much time to allow in which to pitch camp in the tropics, where night follows day suddenly when a halt was called, as a turn of the river showed a little clearing on the edge of the forest-bound river. "We stay here for the night," said Jacinto. "It is a good place." "It looks picturesque enough," observed Mr. Damon. "But it is rather wild."