unity! Episodes seem so often sweeter than plots! The wayside joys are better than the final successes; the flowers along the vista, brighter than the victor-wreaths at its close. I may not dally on my way, turning to the right and the left for beauty and caricature. I will balance on the strict edge of my narrative, as a seventh-heavenward Mahometan, with wine-forbidden steadiness of poise, treads Al Seràt, his bridge of a sword-blade.
Next morning, at Albany, divergent trains cleft our party into a better and a worser half. The beautiful girls, our better half, fled westward to ripen their pallid roses with richer summer-hues in mosquitoless inland dells. Iglesias and I were still northward bound.
At the Saratoga station we sipped a dreary, faded reminiscence of former joys and sparkling brilliancy long dead, in cups of Congress-water, brought by unattractive Ganymedes and sold in the train, — draughts flat, flabby, and utterly bubbleless, luke-warm heel-taps with a flavor of savorless salt.
Still northward journeying, and feeling the seaside moisture evaporate from our blood under inland suns and sultry inland breezes, we came to Lake Champlain.
As before banquets, to excite appetite, one takes the gentle oyster, so we, before the serious pleasure of our journey, tasted the Adirondack region, paradise of Cockney sportsmen. There, through the forest, the stag of ten trots, coquetting with greenhorns. He likes the excitement of being shot at
