A little beyond this village we came in sight of the Water Gap, where the Blue Ridge has been cloven down to its base to form a passage for the Delaware.  Two lofty summits, black with precipices of rock, form the gates through which the river issues into the open country.  Here it runs noisily over the shallows, as if boasting aloud of the victory it had achieved in breaking its way through such mighty barriers; but within the Gap it sleeps in quiet pools, or flows in deep glassy currents.  By the side of these you see large rafts composed of enormous trunks of trees that have floated down with the spring floods from the New York forests, and here wait for their turn in the saw-mills along the shore.  It was a bright morning, with a keen autumnal air, and we dismounted from our vehicle and walked through the Gap.

It will give your readers an idea of the Water Gap, to say that it consists of a succession of lofty peaks, like the Highlands of the Hudson, with a winding and irregular space between them a few rods wide, to give passage to the river.  They are unlike the Highlands, however, in one respect, that their sides are covered with large loose blocks detached from the main precipices.  Among these grows the original forest, which descends to their foot, fringes the river, and embowers the road.

The present autumn is, I must say, in regard to the coloring of the forests, one of the shabbiest and least brilliant I remember to have seen in this country, almost as sallow and dingy in its hues as an autumn in Europe.  But here in the Water Gap it was not without some of its accustomed brightness of tints—­the sugar-maple with its golden leaves, and the water-maple with its foliage of scarlet, contrasted with the intense green of the hemlock-fir, the pine, the rosebay-laurel, and the mountain-laurel, which here grow in the same thicket, while the ground below was carpeted with humbler evergreens, the aromatic wintergreen, and the trailing arbutus.  The Water Gap is about a mile in length, and near its northern entrance an excellent hotel, the resort of summer visitors, stands on a cliff which rises more than a hundred feet almost perpendicularly from the river.  From this place the eye follows the Water Gap to where mountains shut in one behind another, like the teeth of a saw, and between them the Delaware twines out of sight.

Before the hotel a fine little boy of about two years of age was at play.  The landlord showed us on the calf of the child’s leg two small lurid spots, about a quarter of an inch apart.  “That,” said he, “is the bite of a copper-head snake.”

We asked when this happened.