Adventures in the Wilderness; Or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks

By WILLIAM H. H. MURRAY. Boston : Fields, Osgood, & Co.

IT was always a notable fact of pioneer life that, while it was difficult almost to impossibility to make a white man out of an Indian, the reverse was perfectly easy. Our race takes kindly and naturally to the woods, as if each one of us had

and so great is the instinctive joy in sylvan life, that men willingly own a remote cousin-ship with the more picturesque and reputable of the four-footed forest denizens, and the more elegant and gay-colored populations of the streams. If we felt sure that this sentiment could be strengthened into a desire to share with them such pleasure in the chase as the deer knows when shot at and ultimately “dropped,” or if we could believe that the trout’s rapture at the instant of being “ struck,” were within the reach of human experience, the chief discomfort with which we read Mr. Murray’s agreeable book would be removed. But certain doubts on these points force themselves upon the mind of the reader of every book of hunting adventure, and they seem to have troubled our author into making some sort of attempt at their solution. He tells us plainly that it is a sin to kill more game or take more fish than you can eat or give away ; but within this limit the passion for capturing and slaying is apparently to be left unrestrained. Let each one determine, as Mr. Murray does, for himself. We remind the sentimentalist that the trout is a gluttonous murderer, whose greed for insects alone brings him into trouble, and that deer are often desperate and bloodstained duellists. Besides, there is very much in this book that can give an unalloyed pleasure ; as, love of nature and a gift for imparting the effect of her wild aspects and majestic moods ; a very robust and healthful manhood ; a sincere delight in the strength which the wilderness gives and the prowess it demands ; an unpatronizing fondness for the odd, backwoods character of the Adirondackers ; a kindliness even for brutes, when these do not assume the unlucky attitude of game. You say, of course, that the style is a bit florid and over-wrought where the author happens to recollect himself, and that, at times, it is a little more “ rollicking ” than you care to have the style even of wild-wood literature ; and perhaps you feel, in some of the humorous passages, that you are not treated quite fairly, and that Mr. Murray has more than his share of the fun ; but you are obliged to confess that these blemishes do not prevent you from reading the book through, and that there is something in it which will not let you go, when you have once taken it up, till the end is reached. The region which it celebrates was by no means unstoried before, but Mr. Murray may fairly claim to be the first to popularize a knowledge of it. It is quite possible that when he goes back this summer he may see the footprints of progress all through his beloved wilderness, and boldly inscribed upon the face of the rocks, in the very heart of those health-giving woods, the mystic legends of the patent-medicine-men. Whether, in view of these desecrations, it will be a sufficient compensation for him to reflect that he has written so temptingly about the Adirondacks, we do not know; but we mean to pay the spirit of his book a high compliment, when we say that we suspect not.