instance, "Perth Amboy" has always had a romantic sound, and I believe
that a certain majesty in the collocation of the two noble words would
survive that visit to the place itself which I have been told is all
that is necessary for disillusionment. On the other hand, for reasons
less explainable, Hackensack, Paterson, Newark, and even Passaic are
names that had touched me with no such romantic thrill. Wrongfully, no
doubt, I had associated them with absurdity, anarchy, and railroads.
Never having visited them, it was perhaps not surprising that I should
not have associated them with such loveliness and luxury of Nature as I
now unforgettably recall; and I cannot help feeling that in the case of
places thus unfortunately named, Nature might well bring an action for
damages, robbed as she thus undoubtedly is of a flock of worshippers.

At all events, I believe that my surprise and even incredulity will be
understood when an artist friend of mine told me that by taking the Fort
Lee ferry, and trolleying from the Palisades through Hackensack to
Paterson, I might find--a dream canal. It was as though he had said that
I had but to cross over to Hoboken to find the Well at the World's End.
But it was true, for all that--quite fairy-tale true. It was one of
those surprises of peace, deep, ancient peace, in America, of which
there are many, and of which more needs to be told. I can conceive of no
more suggestive and piquant contrast than that of the old canal gliding
through water-lilies and spreading pastures, in the bosom of hills
clothed with trees that scatter the sunshine or gather the darkness, the
haunt of every bird that sings or flashes strange plumage and is gone,
gliding past flowering rushes and blue dragon-flies, not

Flowing down to Camelot,

as one might well believe, but between Newark and Phillipsburg, touching
Paterson midway with its dreaming hand.

Following my friend's directions, we had met at Paterson, and, desirous
of finding our green pasture and still waters with the least possible
delay, we took a trolley running in the Newark direction, and were
presently dropped at a quaint, quiet little village called Little Falls,
the last we were to see of the modern work-a-day world for several
miles. A hundred yards or so beyond, and it is as though you had entered
some secret green door into a pastoral dream-land. Great trees, like
rustling walls of verdure, enclose an apparently endless roadway o