e bosom of the water, and creep
up the hill-sides, and at noon float their feathery vapors aloft in
clouds; the crimson trees blaze in the side valleys, and blend their
vermilion tints under the fairy hands of our American frost-painters
with the dark blood of the ash-trees and the orange-tinted oaks. Blue
and bright under the clear Fall heaven, the broad river shines before
the surging prow of the boat like a shield of steel.

The bracing air lights up rich dreams of life. Your fancy peoples the
valleys and the hill-tops with its creations; and your hope lends some
crowning beauty of the landscape to your dreamy future. The vision of
your last college year is not gone. That figure, whose elegance your
eyes then feasted on, still floats before you; and the memory of the
last talk with Laura is as vivid as if it were only yesterday that you
listened. Indeed this opening campaign of travel--although you are half
ashamed to confess it to yourself--is guided by the thought of her.

Dalton with a party of friends, his sister among them, is journeying to
the north. A hope of meeting them--scarce acknowledged as an
intention--spurs you on. The eye rests dreamily and vaguely on the
beauties that appear at every turn: they are beauties that charm you,
and charm you the more by an indefinable association with that fairy
object that floats before you, half unknown, and wholly unclaimed. The
quiet towns with their noonday stillness, the out-lying mansions with
their stately splendor, the bustling cities with their mocking din, and
the long reaches of silent and wooded shore, chime with their several
beauties to your heart, in keeping with the master-key that was touched
long weeks before.

The cool, honest advices of the father drift across your memory in
shadowy forms, as you wander through the streets of the first northern
cities; and all the need for observation, and the incentives to purpose,
which your ambitious designs would once have quickened, fade dismally
when you find that _she_ is not there. All the lax gayety of Saratoga
palls on the appetite; even the magnificent shores of Lake George,
though stirring your spirit to an insensible wonder and love, do not
cheat you into a trance that lingers. In vain the sun blazons every
isle, and lights every shaded cove, and at evening stretches the Black
Mountain in giant slumber on the waters.

Your thought bounds away from the beauty of sky and lake, and fastens
upon the ideal