The wanderers thought at first to explore the ground near the lake shore, but soon abandoned this resolution, on finding the under-growth of trees and bushes become so thick, that they made little progress, and the fatigue of travelling was greatly increased by having continually to put aside the bushes or bend them down.
Hector advised trying the higher ground: and after following a deer-path through a small ravine that crossed the hills, they found themselves on a fine extent of table-land, richly, but not too densely wooded with white and black oaks, diversified with here and there a solitary pine, which reared its straight and pillar-like trunk in stately grandeur above its leafy companions: a meet eyrie for the bald-eagle, that kept watch from its dark crest over the silent waters of the lake, spread below like a silver zone studded with emeralds.
In their progress, they passed the head of many small ravines, which divided the hilly shores of the lake into deep furrows; these furrows had once been channels, by which the waters of some upper lake (the site of which is now dry land) had at a former period poured down into the valley, filling the basin of what now is called the Rice Lake. These waters with resistless course had ploughed their way between the hills, bearing in their course those blocks of granite and limestone which are so widely scattered both on the hill-tops and the plains, or form a rocky pavement at the bottom of the narrow denies. What a sight of sublime desolation must that outpouring of the waters have presented, when those steep banks were riven by the sweeping torrents that were loosened from their former bounds. The pleased eye rests upon these tranquil shores, now covered with oaks and pines, or waving with a flood of golden grain, or varied by neat dwellings and fruitful gardens; and the gazer on that peaceful scene scarcely pictures to himself what it must have been when no living eye was there to mark the rushing floods, when they scooped to themselves the deep bed in which they now repose.
Those lovely islands that sit like stately crowns upon the waters, were doubtless the wreck that remained of the valley; elevated spots, whose rocky basis withstood the force of the rushing waters, that carried away the lighter portions of the soil. The southern shore, seen from the lake, seems to lie in regular ridges running from south to north; some few are parallel with the lake-shore, possibly where some surmountable impediment turned the current the subsiding waters; but they all find an outlet through their connexion with ravines communicating with the lake.