THE LAST BEAR:

A SCRAP FROM THE SKETCH BOOK OF A RHODE ISLANDER.

It was a hot and breathless afternoon, toward the last days of July-one of those days of fiery, scorching heat, that drive the care-worn citizens from their great red-hot oven, into those calm and peaceful shades of the sweet unsophisticated country, which, to them, savour far more of purgatory than they do of paradise,-"for quiet, to quick bosoms, is a hell," and theirs are quick enough, heaven knows, in Wall-street. It was a hot and breathless afternoon—the sun, which had been scourging the faint earth all day long with a degree of heat endurable by those alone who can laugh at 100° of Fahrenheit, was stooping toward the western verge of heaven; but no drop of diamond dew had as yet fallen to refresh the innocent flowers, that hung their heads like maidens smitten by passionate and ill-requited love; no indication of the evening breeze had sent its welcome whisper among the motionless and silent tree-tops. Such was the season and the hour when, having started, long before Dan Phoebus had arisen from his bed, to beat the mountain swales about the greenwood lake, and having bagged, by dint of infinite exertion and vast sudor, present alike to dogs and men, our thirty couple of good summer woodcock, Archer and I paused on the bald scalp of Round Mountain.

Crossing a little ridge, we came suddenly upon the loveliest and most fairy-looking ghyll (for I must have recourse to a north-country word to denote that which lacks a name in any other dialect of the Anglo-Saxon tongue) I ever looked upon. Not, at the most, above ten yards wide at the brink, nor above five in depth, it was clothed with a dense rich growth of hazel, birch, and juniper; the small rill brawling and sparkling in a thousand mimic cataracts over the tiny limestone ledges which opposed its progress-a beautiful profusion of wild flowers--the tall and vivid spikes of the bright scarlet habenaria-the gorgeous yellow cups of the low growing enothera and many gaily-coloured creepers decked the green marges of the water, or curled, in clustering beauty, over the neighbouring coppice. We followed for a few paces this fantastic cleft, until it widened into a circular recess or cove -the summit-level of its waters-whence it dashed headlong, some twenty-five or thirty feet, into the chasm below. The floor of this small basin was paved with the bare rock, through the very midst of which the little stream had worn a channel scarcely a foot in depth, its clear cold waters glancing like crystal over its pebbly bed. On three sides it was hemmed in by steep banks, so densely set with the evergreen junipers, interlaced and matted. with cat-briers and other creeping plants, that a small dog could not, without a struggle, have forced its way through the close thicket. On the fourth side, fronting the opening of the rift by which the waters found their egress, there stood a tall, flat face of granite rock, completely blocking up the glen, perfectly smooth and slippery, until it reached the height of forty feet, when it became uneven,