nce of his employer, he found
himself well upon the road to Schaeffer's Farm before he had by any
means decided to go thither.

The pleasantest part of the "carriage exercise" on this road is fording
the Creek, a course adopted wherever the bluff comes down to the bank,
and the flat reappears upon the opposite side, no one having yet spent
time to grade a continuous road on one side or the other. A railway
company has, however, made a beginning in this direction; and it is
promised that in another year the traveller may proceed from Schaeffer's
to Oil City by rail.

At Titusville Miselle bade good-bye to her kind friend Williams, and
once more took herself under her own protection.

Spending the night at Corry, she next day found herself in the city of
Erie, and could have fancied it Heidelberg instead, the signs bearing
such names as Schultz, Seelinger, Jantzen, Cronenberger, Heidt, and
Heybeck. Hans Preuss sells bread, Valentin Ulrich manufactures saddles,
and P. Loesch keeps a meat-market, with a sign representing one
gentleman holding a mad bull by a bit of packthread tied to his horns,
while an assistant leisurely strolls up to annihilate the creature with
a tack-hammer.

Here, too, a little beyond the middle of the town, was a girl herding a
flock of geese, precisely as did the princess in the "Brueder Grimm
Tales," while a doltish boy stared at her with just the imbecile
admiration of Kurdkin for the wily maiden who combed her golden, hair
and chanted her naughty spell in the same breath.

A little farther on stood a charming old Dutch cottage with cabbages in
the front yard, and a hop-vine clambering the porch. An infant Teuton
swung upon the gate, who, being addressed by Miselle, lisped an answer
in High Dutch, while his mother shrilly exchanged the news with her next
neighbor in the same tongue.

Two hours sufficed to exhaust the wonders of Erie, and Miselle gladly
took the cars for Buffalo, and on the road thither fell in with a good
Samaritan, who solaced her weary faintness with delicate titbits of
grouse, shot and roasted upon an Ohio prairie.

At Buffalo waited the Eastern-bound cars of the New-York Central
Railway; but only twenty miles farther on, thundered Niagara, and
Miselle could not choose but obey the sonorous summons. So, after
spending the night at a "white man's" hotel in Buffalo, the next morning
found her standing, an insignificant atom, before one of the world's
great wonders. One o