r lightness did not at all commend them. The
waitress had not liked it from the first, and had served them with
reluctance; and the proprietor did not like it, and kept his eye upon
them as if he believed them about to escape without payment. Here, then,
they had enforced a great fact of 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 sau