ds behind us, it
seemed already miles away, wrapped in lonely distance, wistfully
forsaken. Everything we looked at seemed to have gained a new importance
and significance; every tree and bush seemed to say, "So many miles to
New York," and we unconsciously looked at and remarked on the most
trifling objects with the eye of explorers, and took as minute an
interest in the usual bird and wayside weed as though we were engaged in
some "flora and fauna" survey of untrodden regions.

"That's a bluebird," said Colin, as a faint pee-weeing came with a thin
melancholy note from a telegraph wire. And we both listened attentively,
with a learned air, as though making a mental note for some
ornithological society in New York. "Bluebird seen in Erie County,
October 1, 1908!" So might Sir John Mandeville have noted the occurrence
of birds of paradise in the domains of Prester John.

"That's a silo," said Colin, pointing to a cylindrical tower at the end
of a group of barns, from which came the sound of an engine surrounded by
a group of men, occupied in feeding it with trusses of corn from a
high-piled wagon. "They are laying in fodder for the Winter." Interesting
agricultural observation!

In the surrounding fields the pumpkins, globes of golden orange, lay
scattered among the wintry-looking corn-stalks.

"Bully subject for a picture!" said Colin.

Before we had gone very far, we did stop at a cottage standing at a
puzzling corner of cross-roads, and asked the way, not to Versailles,
indeed, but to--Dutch Hollow. We were answered by a good-humoured German
voice belonging to an old dame, who seemed glad to have the lonely
afternoon silence broken by human speech; and we were then, as often
afterward, reminded that we were not so far away from Europe, after all;
but that, indeed, in no small degree the American continent was the map
of Europe bodily transported across the sea. For the present our way lay
through Germany.

Dutch Hollow! The name told its own story, and it had appealed to our
imaginations as we had come upon it on the map.

We had thought we should like to see how it looked written in trees and
rocks and human habitations on the page of the landscape. And I may say
that it was such fanciful considerations as this, rather than any more
business-like manner of travel, that frequently determined the route of
our essentially sentimental journey. If our way admitted of a choice of
direction, we usually decided by t