White Magic - A Novel

Lake Wauchong is the crowning charm of that whole north New Jersey wilderness, rich though its variety is—watercourses hard to equal in sheer loveliness; lonely mountains from whose steeps look majesty and awe; stretches of stony desolation and of gloomy, bittern-haunted swamp that seem the fitting borderland of an inferno. At the southwestern end of the lake it receives the waters of a creek by way of a small cataract. In the spring, especially in the early spring, when there is most water on the cataract and when the foliage is at its freshest, most exquisite green, the early morning sunbeams make of that little corner of the lake a sort of essence and epitome of the lovely childhood of Nature.