wholesome."--JOHN BURROUGHS: Pepacton.


The right to the name of Ampersand, like the territory of Gaul in those
Commentaries which Julius Caesar wrote for the punishment of schoolboys,
is divided into three parts. It belongs to a mountain, and a lake, and a
little river.

The mountain stands in the heart of the Adirondack country, just near
enough to the thoroughfare of travel for thousands of people to see it
every year, and just far enough from the beaten track to be unvisited
except by a very few of the wise ones, who love to turn aside. Behind
the mountain is the lake, which no lazy man has ever seen. Out of the
lake flows the stream, winding down a long, untrodden forest valley, to
join the Stony Creek waters and empty into the Raquette River.

Which of the three Ampersands has the prior claim to the name, I cannot
tell. Philosophically speaking, the mountain ought to be regarded as the
head of the family, because it was undoubtedly there before the others.
And the lake was probably the next on the ground, because the stream
is its child. But man is not strictly just in his nomenclature; and I
conjecture that the little river, the last-born of the three, was the
first to be christened Ampersand, and then gave its name to its parent
and grand-parent. It is such a crooked stream, so bent and curved and
twisted upon itself, so fond of turning around unexpected corners and
sweeping away in great circles from its direct course, that its first
explorers christened it after the eccentric supernumerary of the
alphabet which appears in the old spelling-books as &-- and per se, and.

But in spite of this apparent subordination to the stream in the matter