steamer or at a great business hotel? We laugh very loftily at the Rhine dinners in which the pud ding and fish meet in the middle of the courses. But a Rhine dinner upon the open, upper deck of the steamer, is quiet and orderly and inoffensive, while one of our gregarious repasts must needs offend every man who has some regard for proprieties and some self-respect.

-And Catskill?

Yes, we are rapidly approaching, even while we sit on deck and our eyes slide along the gentle green banks, as we meditate American manners and the extremes that meet in our characteristics. Beyond Poughkeepsie a train darts along the shore, rattling over the stones on the water's edge, and rolling with muffled roar behind the cuts and among the heavy foliage. So nearly matched is our speed, that until the locomotive ran beside us, I did not know how rapid was our silent movement. But there is heat and bustle and dust in the nervous little train, which winds along, like a jointed reptile, while with our stately steamer there is silence, and the cool, constant patter of the few drops, where our sharp prow cuts the river.

A little above Poughkeepsie the river bends, and the finest point is gained. It is a foreground of cultivated and foliaged hills of great variety of outline,

rising as they recede, and ranging, and towering at last along the horizon, in the Catskill mountains. It was a brilliant day, and the heavy, rounding clouds piled in folds along the line of the hills-taking, at length, precisely their own hue, and so walling up the earth with a sombre, vaporous rampart, such as Titans and fallen angels storm. As we glided nearer, keen flashes darted from the wall of cloud, and as if riven and rent with its sharpness, the heavy masses rolled asunder; then more heavily piled themselves in dense darkness, fold overlying fold, while the startled wind changed, and rushed down the river, chilled, and breathing cold before the storm.

No longer a wall, but a swiftly advancing and devastating power, the storm threw up pile upon pile of jagged blackness into the clear, tender blue of the afternoon, and there was a wail in the hurried gusts that swept past us and over us, and the river curled more and more into sudden waves, which were foamtipped, and scattered spray.

We were now abreast of the mountains, and far behind them the storm had burst. Down the vast ravines that opened outward toward the river, I saw the first softness of the shower skimming along the distant hillsides, moister and grayer, until they were merged in mist. Deep into those solemn mountain forests leaped the lightning, and the echo of its

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wrathful roar surged and boomed among the hills, and dashed far up the cliffs and dark hemlock slopes, and crashed over the gurgling brooks, where was none to hear but the trees and the streams, and they were undismayed, and in the shuddering breeze of the pauses the trees rustled and whispered to the streams, and the streams laughed to themselves-the strange, sweet, mystical laughter that Undine laughed.

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'They roll their nine-pins still, among the Catskill," said Olde.

"And there's a ten-strike," interposed Swansdowne, as a mighty bolt burst among the hills, but still toward the inner valleys, for the slope toward the river yet stood in cold, dark, purple distinctness.

The breeze was cool and strong as we landed at

B*

Catskill. We were huddled ashore rapidly, the board was pulled in, and the "New World" disappeared. I proposed riding up to the Mountain House on the outside of the coach, but Olde smiled and said, "I shall go inside."

Now Olde loves scenery as well as any man, poet or painter, but he holds that a drenching rain destroys both the beauty of the scene and the capacity for enjoyment of the seer, and while I stood with my hand upon the door, my common sense thoroughly convinced, as well by his action as by his words, but my carnal heart lusting after the loveliness of the cloud-crowned and shower-veiled mountains, there came another ten-strike that suddenly shook a cloud to pieces over our heads and down it came.

"I think I shall go inside, too," said I, as I stum bled up the steps and closed the door.

During the first eight miles of the inland drive toward the Mountain House, I enjoyed the prospect of six travellers, four stained leather curtains, and the two wooden windows of the door. It was not cool inside the coach, but without, the wind was in high frolic with the rain, and through the slightest crevice the wily witch dashed us with her missiles, cold and very wet. Then the showers swept along a little, and we threw up the curtains and breathed fresh air, and about three miles from the Mountain

House, where the steep ascent commences, Olde and Swansdowne and I jumped out of the stage and walked. The road is very firmly built, and is fortu nate in its material of a slaty rock, and in the luxuriance of foliage, for the tangled tree-roots hold the soil together.

The road climbs at first in easy zigzags, and presently pushes straight on through the woods, and upon the side of a steep ravine; the level-branched foliage sheering regularly down, sheeting the mountain side with leafy terraces. Between the trunks and down the gorges we looked over a wide but mountainous landscape, and as we ascended, the air became more invigorating with the greater height and the coolness of the shower. Two hours before sunset we stood upon the plateau before the Moun tain House, 2,800 feet above the sea.

There is a fine sense of height there, but all mountain views over a plain are alike. You stand on the piazza of the Mountain House and look directly down into the valley of the Hudson, with only a foreground, deep beneath you, of a lower layer than that on which you stand, with its precipice of pine and hemlock. The rest stretches then, a smooth surface to the eye, but hilly enough to the feet, when you are there, to an unconfined horizon at the north and south, and easterly to the Berkshire hills.