The wild gorge, or dell, through which it passes, abounds in waterfalls of surpassing beauty, varying from ten to a hundred feet in height, whose rocks are green with the moss of centuries, and whose brows are ever wreathed with the most exquisite of vines and flowers. Here is the Double Leap, with its almost fathomless pool, containing a hermit trout, that has laughed at the angler’s skill for a score of years; the Fall of the Mountain Spirit, haunted, as it is said, by the disembodied spirit of an Indian girl, who lost her life here, while pursuing a phantom of the brain; and here is the Blue Bell Fall, for ever guarded by a multitudinous array of those charming flowers. Caverns, too, and chasms are here, dark, deep, chilly, and damp, where the toad, the lizard, and snake, and strange families of insects, are perpetually multiplying, and actually seeming to enjoy their loathsome lives; and here is the Black Chasm and the Devil’s Chamber, the latter with perpendicular walls, twice the height of Old Trinity, and with a wainscoting of pines and hemlocks, which have “braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze.” Plauterkill Clove is an eddy of the great and tumultuous world, and in itself a world of unwritten poetry, whose primitive loveliness has not yet been disfigured by the influence of Mammon. It has been consecrated by a brotherhood of friends, well tried and true, to the pure religion of nature; and after spending a summer day therein, and then emerging under the open sky, their feelings are always allied to those of a pilgrim in a strange land, passing through the dreamy twilight of an old cathedral.
But it is time that I should change my tune, as I desire to record a few fishing adventures, which I have lately experienced among the Catskills. My first excursion was performed along the margin of Sweetwater Brook, which flows out of the lake already mentioned. My guide and companion was a notorious hunter of this region, named Peter Hummel, whose services I have engaged for all my future rambles among the mountains. He is decidedly one of the wildest and rarest characters I have ever known, and would be a valuable acquisition to a menagerie. He was born in a little hut, at the foot of South Peak, is twenty-seven years of age, and has never been to school a day in his life, or, in his travels towards civilization, further away from home than fifteen miles. He was educated for a bark-gatherer, his father and several brothers having always been in the business; but Peter is averse to common-place labour, to anything, in fact, that will bring money.