Chapter 9

"Yet art thou prodigal of smiles
-Smiles, sweeter than thy frowns are stern:
Earth sends from all her thousand isles,
A shout at thy return.
The glory that comes down from thee
Bathes, in deep joy, the land and sea."

Bryant, 'The Firmament," 11.19-24

It may assist the reader in understanding the events we are about
to record, if he has a rapidly sketched picture of the scene, placed
before his eyes at a single view. It will be remembered that the
lake was an irregularly shaped basin, of an outline that, in the
main, was oval, but with bays and points to relieve its formality
and ornament its shores. The surface of this beautiful sheet of
water was now glittering like a gem, in the last rays of the evening
sun, and the setting of the whole, hills clothed in the richest
forest verdure, was lighted up with a sort of radiant smile, that
is best described in the beautiful lines we have placed at the head
of this chapter. As the banks, with few exceptions, rose abruptly
from the water, even where the mountain did not immediately bound
the view, there was a nearly unbroken fringe of leaves overhanging
the placid lake, the trees starting out of the acclivities, inclining
to the light, until, in many instances they extended their long
limbs and straight trunks some forty or fifty feet beyond the line
of the perpendicular. In these cases we allude only to the giants
of the forest, pines of a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet in
height, for of the smaller growth, very many inclined so far as to
steep their lower branches in the water. In the position in which
the Ark had now got, the castle was concealed from view by the
projection of a point, as indeed was the northern extremity of the
lake itself. A respectable mountain, forest clad, and rounded,
like all the rest, limited the view in that direction, stretching
immediately across the whole of the fair scene, with the exception
of a deep bay that passed the western end, lengthening the basin,
for more than a mile.

The manner in which the water flowed out of the lake, beneath the
leafy arches of the trees that lined the sides of the stream, has
already been mentioned, and it has also been said that the rock,
which was a favorite place of rendezvous throughout all that region,
and where Deerslayer now expected to meet his friend, stood near this
outlet, and at no great distance from the shore. It was a large,
isolated stone that rested on the bottom of the lake, apparently
left there when the waters tore away the earth from around it,
in forcing for themselves a passage down the river, and which had
obtained its shape from the action of the elements, during the
slow progress of centuries. The height of this rock