Through this expanse lies the Hudson, not very sinuous, but a line of light dividing the plain. In the vague twilight atmosphere it was very effective. Sometimes the mist blotted out individual outlines, and the whole scene was but a silver-gray abyss, and the hither line of the river was the horizon, and the stream itself a white gleam of sky beyond. Then the distance and the foreground were mingled in the haze, a shining opaque veil, wherein the river was a rent, through which beamed a remote brightness. Or the vapors clustered toward the south and the stream flowed into them, flashing and far, as into a terrene cloud-land. All the country was chequered with yellow patches of ripe grain, and marked faintly with walls and fences, and looked rather a vast domain than a mountain-ruled landscape.

Whoever is familiar with mountain scenery will know what to anticipate in the Catskill view. The whole thing is graceful and generous, but not sublime. Your genuine mountaineer (which I am not) shrugs his shoulder at the shoulders of mountains which soar thousands of feet above him and are still shaggy with forest. He draws a long breath over the spacious plain, but he feels the want of that true mountain sublimity, the presence of lonely snowpeaks.

And as we always require in scenery of a similar class, similar emotions, there is necessarily a little disappointment in the Catskill. They are hills rather than mountains. But, as they have the fame of mountains, you are recalling your Alpine impressions, all the way up. It is not very wise, perhaps, but it is very natural and rather unavoidable. Yet, when the night falls, the silence and coolness of your lofty home, impart the genuine mountain tone to your thoughts. Then you begin to acknowledge the family resemblance, and to remember Switzerland.

When I was on the Faulhorn, the highest point in Europe upon which a dwelling-house is placed, and that inhabited for three months only in the year, I stepped out in the middle of the night, and as I looked across the valley of Grindelwald and saw the snow-fields and ice-precipices of all the Horns— never trodden and never to be trodden by man— shining cold in the moonlight, my heart stood still as I felt that those awful peaks and I were alone in the solemn solitude. Then I felt the significance of Switzerland, and knew the sublimity of mountains.

And do you remember, said Olde, how delicately the dawn touched those summits with cool, bright fingers, and how their austerity burned and blushed under that caressing, until the sunrise overwhelmed them with rosy flame, and they flashed

perfect day far over Switzerland; and hours afterward, when day was old upon the mountain tops, how gentlemen-travellers turned in their beds in the valley inns, and said, "Hallo, Tom, the sun is rising?"

The Mountain House is really unceremonious. You are not required to appear at dinner in ball costume, and if you choose, you may scramble to the Falls in cowhide boots and not in varnished pumps. The house has a long and not ill-proportioned Corinthian colonnade, wooden of course, and glaring white. The last point, however, is a satisfaction from below, for its vivid contrast with the dark green forest reveals the house from a great distance upon the river. The table is well supplied, but Olde and Swansdowne were forced to throw themselves upon the compassion of the chambermaid, (I would say Femme-de-Chambre, if a single eye, slopping shoes, and a thick, cotton handkerchief pinned night-cap-wise over the head, would possibly allow that suggestive word,) and to submit that a towel of the magnitude of a small mouchoir, (they did not say mouchoir,) was not large allowance for two full-grown men. The dame's answer had gravity and instance.

"Gentlemen, how can I give you what we have

not?"

A written placard around the house announced

CATSKILL.

C

CALIFORNIA 39

that dancing music could be had at the bar. But none wished to polk-and how music could be made in that parlor, which seemed to have been dislocated by some tempestuous mountain ague, remains a mystery to me. There are eight windows, and none of them opposite to any of the others; folding-doors which have gone down the side of the room in some wild architectural dance, and have never returned, and a row of small columns stretching in an independent line across the room, quite irrespective of the middle. It is a dangerous parlor for a nervous

man.

We sat on the edge of the precipice, looking off into the black abyss of night. Swansdowne told wild tales of crazy men in lonely nooks of Scotland, and Olde talked of Italy. They were pleasant days, he said, which shall return no more.

"My eyes are full of childish tears,

My heart is idly stirred,

For the same sound is in my ears,
That in those days I heard.

"Thus fares it still in our decay,

And yet the wiser mind

Mourns less for what age takes away

That what it leaves behind."