CHAPTER II.
BARRACKS FOR THE HERO.
Wade packed his kit, and took the Hudson River train for Dunderbunk the same afternoon.
He swallowed his dust, he gasped for his fresh air, he wept over his cinders, he refused his "lozengers," he was admired by all the pretty girls and detested by all the puny men in the train, and in good time got down at his station.
He stopped on the platform to survey the land- and water-privileges of his new abode.
"The June sunshine is unequalled," he soliloquized, "the river is splendid, the hills are pretty, and the Highlands, north, respectable; but the village has gone to seed. Place and people look lazy, vicious, and ashamed. I suppose those chimneys are my Foundry. The smoke rises as if the furnaces were ill-fed and weak in the lungs. Nothing, I can see, looks alive, except that queer little steamboat coming in,—the 'I. Ambuster,'—jolly name for a boat!"
Wade left his traps at the station, and walked through the village. All the gilding of a golden sunset of June could not make it anything but commonplace. It would be forlorn on a gray day, and utterly dismal in a storm.
"I must look up a civilized house to lodge in," thought the stranger. "I cannot possibly camp at
