always enjoyed the finest valley views of any mountain outlook,
and they have a right to the best hotels.

* * *

There is a fall in the hills, where the water of two
little ponds runs over the rocks into the valley. The
first pitch is nigh two hundred feet and the water looks
like flakes of driven snow before it touches the bottom.

_James Fenimore Cooper._

* * *

It may seem antiquated and old-fashioned in the midst of elevated
railroads to speak of mountain driveways, but that to Palenville, as
we last saw it, was a beautiful piece of engineering--as smooth as a
floor and securely built. It looks as if it were intended to last for
a century, the stone work is so thoroughly finished. The views from
this road are superior to anything we have seen in the Catskills, and
the great sweep of the mountain clove recalls a Sierra Nevada trip on
the way to the Yosemite.

The writer will never forget another Catskill drive fully twenty
years ago. Starting one morning with a pair of mustang ponies from
Phoenicia, we called at the Kaaterskill, the Catskill Mountain
House, and the Laurel House, took supper at Catskill Village, and
reached New York that evening at eleven o'clock. It is unnecessary to
say that we were on business--our book was on the press--and we went
as if one of the printers' best-known companions was on our trail.

Irving's description of his first voyage up the river brings us more
delicately and gracefully down from these mountains to the Hudson--the
level highway to the sea. "Of all the scenery of the Hudson, the
Kaatskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish
imagination. Never shall I forget the effect upon me of my first view
of them, predominating over a wide extent of country--part wild, woody
and rugged; part softened away into all the graces of cultivation. As
we slowly floated along, I lay on the deck and watched them through a
long summer's day, undergoing a thousand mutations under the magical
effects of atmosphere; sometimes seeming to approach; at other times
to recede; now almost melting into hazy distance, now burnished by the
setting sun, until in the evening they printed themselves against the
glowing sky in the deep purple of an Italian landscape."

* * *

Limned upon the fair horizon,
West from central Hudson's tide,
The fair form of Ontiora
Throughout ages shall abide.

_Jared Barhete._

* * *

=C