stood on the summit of Mount Holyoke and surveyed the windings of the Connecticut river, through a valley equal in fertility and agricultural excelence to the lands that are intertwined with the links of the Forth, can fail to see that time only is wanting to bring the whole of the country into the finest bearing condition? The climb to Mount Holyoke, though toilsome, is richly rewarded by the view obtained. You can trace the limits of snug farms, and see their regularly laid out ridges which could not be surpassed for accuracy of line in a Northumberland or Roxburghshire ploughingmatch-you can count their convenient farm-houses and onsteads, for miles, till the eye is weary, and rest it on the pretty spires among the trees that look so like Old England. Everything in the Connecticut valley is rich and regular. The land is peopled up to its capabilities; and if the sharp frosts and scorching suns would suffer the quickset hedge to grow, and that feature were added to the landscape, it would be exactly like home. We must, however, always except the giant style of everything American. The Forth, with all its lovely links, even though a tide-river, lies but like a silver thread in the landscape, compared to the Connecticut. The latter river has proved the weight of its waters, by cutting its way through the neck of a peninsula around which it had flowed for centuries, so that at last it has possessed itself of a picturesque islet in its bosom consisting of several

acres of the richest alluvial soil which centuries of river laving could deposit. The contrast between the whole district and some parts of that between Albany and Buffalo, is as complete as can be between the smooth-polished and productive and the newlypossessed and wild.

For many miles the nor'-western rail runs parallel with the Mohawk River; the valley is narrow, and occasionally the rocks which hem it in are precipitous and exhibit some rugged grandeur-but in no place is it so narrow as to exclude its three remarkable features. First, the Old Mohawk, which has had time enough to cut its way through these rocks since the waters of the deluge subsided. Second, the canal a Herculean labour, which has united Lake Erie with the Hudson River for many a year, and carried many a white boat laden with produce down to the river's margin. And, last, the iron way, which in that part has been put down with little trouble of blasting rocks or raising levels. One skims over scores of miles without a tunnel, and with only here and there a bridge over some mountain torrent that is skipping its way down to join the waters at the bottom of the valley.

The progress of the canal-boats, after they join the Hudson, has been much accelerated by the use of steam-tugs. Instead of tacking about and creeping down the great river, they make a steady undeviating progress, as many as half a score at a time. The persevering "Walk-on-the-Water" steamboat,

like the hen in the midst of her brood, plies her onward way. They may be many and cumbrous, but she is the mother, and must care for them all. They cover half an acre of water, hooked on two or three deep on each side, and dropping far behind; many of the boats with three tiers or galleries of various merchandise, including live stock, while the central mover of them all has her freight of goods also, and the human beings who tend their several cargoes.

There is not a finer prospect in the world, either in a picturesque or social point of view, than that to be obtained from the heights of Mount Hope, in the beautiful district which bears the name of Hyde Park, so familiar to the English ear. The trees there have all the magnificence of ancient forest denizens—a grandeur which is not to be found in the crowded and tangled wilder forest. The swells of earth, the abrupt precipices, the Catskill mountains, blue and bounding the distant horizon, are all striking. Then the Hudson appearing in long reaches, hiding itself behind the noble banks and again coming forth in its changeless majesty— onward-onward; seeming to have but one object in its persistent flow-namely, to reach the ocean— yet all the while ministering to industry, to fertility, and to commerce.

There is a charm never to be forgotten found on those lovely heights, fanned by the airs and scented by the roses of June, while the eye ranges from the

grand to the lovely-from the beautiful to the useful-from the still life to the active. The lofty trees waving their proud branches to the breeze, and the graceful small sail-boats darting about like seafowl at play on the sparkling wavelets, contrast finely with the business-like progress of many laden barks, the gay passenger steamers, and the matronly looking mother-boat with all her chickens around her.

What a beautiful world has been given to us to dwell in beautiful still, in spite of its moral deformities!

But I must return to the journey on the railway, towards Buffalo.

We paused at Herkimer, and there, for the first time, saw an Indian woman in the costume of her tribe. She was an Oneida, equipped in a dark blue cloth petticoat and moccasins, and a blanket, fastened with a kind of skewer where the Highland brooch would have been used by our mountaineers. Her massy hair, black, till towards its roots it assumed a tinge of blue, braided and fixed up with a bunch of red worsted strings, was the only covering of her head. At the first glance one might have thought her at least fifty, as she hung on the platform of the railway, stretching out her naked, skinny arm, with a small store of Indian purses, needlebooks, and pincushions for sale. She dropped into the inn after us, and by and by we found her standing, tall, erect, and still as death, behind the

door of the public room, with her long dark arm and her wares extended as before. Her long yellow teeth, standing like stakes in an ill-filled-up fence, made one think of dried heads of New Zealanders, and other unpleasant specimens of the human form in savage life, that we have seen in the museums of the civilised. After subduing something in my breast that might be a mixture of timidity and repugnance, I ventured to speak to the dismal ghost, and found her willing to communicate, as far as her command of my language, which was not very extensive, enabled her. When her features relaxed a very little as she spoke, twenty years, at least, seemed taken from her age. She told me with a heavy sigh, that her people were once numerous, their hunters fleet, and their warriors brave. But they were now weak and few, and they have yielded to the white man their hunting grounds, and gone far west. I suggested that they had room to hunt where they were settled, if they did not find it best to plant corn, and live in houses, and adopt the habits of the whites. She said they had adopted them, and now have corn, and pumpkins, and horses, and ploughs, and sheep. She said a few, about two hundred, still lingered here, and had a village not far off, though the mass of the tribe are gone to the west, and that here they have a minister, and schoolmaster, and can read and write. She also shewed that her people have adopted the Christian creed, and that she was tolerably well informed in the outline of

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