hkeepsie's great days when he came. Daniel
Webster has spoken in her court house; and Henry Clay, in 1844, when a
presidential candidate, stopped for a reception. And it is said that,
by a mere accident, she just missed contributing a name to the list of
presidents of the United States. The omitted candidate was Nathaniel
P. Talmadge. He could have had the vice-presidential candidacy, the
story goes, in 1840, but would not take it. If he had accepted it, he
would have gone into history not merely as United States senator
from New York and afterwards Governor of Wisconsin territory, but as
president in John Tyler's place.

"In 1844, the New York State Fair was held here somewhere east of what
is now Hooker Avenue. It was an occasion thought important enough then
to be pictured and reported in the London _Illustrated News_. Two
years after the telegraph wires were put up in this city, before they
had yet reached the city of New York. Considering the fact that Prof.
S. F. B. Morse, the telegraph inventor, had his residence here, this
incident was not wholly inappropriate.

"The advent in 1849 of the _Hudson River Railroad_, which was an
enterprise in its day of startling courage and magnitude, constituted
a special epoch in the history of Poughkeepsie and the Hudson River
towns. Men of middle age here well remember the hostility and ridicule
the project occasioned when it was first broached. Some said no
railroad ever _could_ be built on the river's edge; and, if you
should build one, the enormous expense incurred would make it forever
unprofitable. It seemed then the height of Quixotism to lay an
expensive track where the river offered a free way to all. Property
holders, whose property was to be greatly benefited, fought the
railroad company with unusual spirit and persistence. But the railroad
came, nevertheless, and needs no advocate or apologist to-day. There
is no one now living here who would ask its removal, any more than he
would ask the removal of the Hudson River itself."

* * *

And lo! the Catskills print the distant sky,
And o'er their airy tops the faint clouds driven,
So softly blending, that the cheated eye
Forgets or which is earth or which is heaven.

_Theodore S. Fay_.

* * *

Mountains on mountains in the distance rise,
Like clouds along the far horizon's verge;
Their misty summits mingling with the skies,
Till earth and heaven seem blended into one.