travelling,--that people who serve the public are kindly
and pleasant in proportion as they serve it well. The unjust and the
inefficient have always that consciousness of evil which will not let a
man forgive his victim, or like him to be cheerful.

Our friends, however, did not heat themselves over the fact. There was
already such heat from without, even at eight o'clock in the morning,
that they chose to be as cool as possible in mind, and they placidly took
their places in the train, which had been made up for departure. They had
deliberately rejected the notion of a drawing-room car as affording a
less varied prospect of humanity, and as being less in the spirit of
ordinary American travel. Now, in reward, they found themselves quite
comfortable in the common passenger-car, and disposed to view the
scenery, into which they struck an hour after leaving the city, with much
complacency. There was sufficient draught through the open window to make
the heat tolerable, and the great brooding warmth gave to the landscape
the charm which it alone can impart. It is a landscape that I greatly
love for its mild beauty and tranquil picturesqueness, and it is in honor
of our friends that I say they enjoyed it. There are nowhere any
considerable hills, but everywhere generous slopes and pleasant hollows
and the wide meadows of a grazing country, with the pretty brown Mohawk
River rippling down through all, and at frequent intervals the life of
the canal, now near, now far away, with the lazy boats that seem not to
stir, and the horses that the train passes with a whirl, and, leaves
slowly stepping forward and swiftly slipping backward. There are farms
that had once, or still have, the romance to them of being Dutch
farms,--if there is any romance in that,--and one conjectures a Dutch
thrift in their waving grass and grain. Spaces of woodland here and there
dapple the slopes, and the cozy red farm-houses repose by the side of
their capacious red barns. Truly, there is no ground on which to defend
the idleness, and yet as the train strives furiously onward amid these
scenes of fertility and abundance, I like in fancy to loiter behind it,
and to saunter at will up and down the landscape. I stop at the farm-yard
gates, and sit upon the porches or thresholds, and am served with cups of
buttermilk by old Dutch ladies who have done their morning's work and
have leisure to be knitting or sewing; or if there are no old ladies,
with decen