All these days were full of great, beautiful pictures.  From the time we leave the Granite State, with it a wild, fierce grandeur, its long, dreary reaches of unfertile pastures, and its wealth of stone wall,—­so abundant that travellers wonder where the stones came from to build it, seeing no lack in the road or field,—­from the time we enter on trim, well-kept Massachusetts, the panorama shifts with ever new interest and beauty.  We leave the pretentious brick houses, or the glaring white ones, which mark the uncultivated taste of the American Switzerland, and enter for the first time regions impressed with the necessary element of fine landscape, maturity.  With and under the old oaks and birches rest the sad-colored houses that have held life and experience,—­birth, death, and old historic adventure.

Looking over the broad meadows that skirt the Connecticut by Hadley and Northampton, one seems to see under the distant oaks spectral shapes of Indian struggle, or wandering regicides, hiding their noble heads in caves, or bursting out like white spirits to lead and avenge.  The air is peopled with traditions far back from the present, but with which the grave, imposing, characteristic landscape seems still to sympathize.

In two days we emerged from the brown chrysalis of a New-Hampshire spring into the exultant richness of the winged butterfly,—­into white, fragrant fields of blossoming fruit, and the odor of tree-lilacs.

In my enchantment at the bounteous panorama that spread out before me in ever varying abundance, I forgot to cultivate any interest in my fellow-passengers, and, except in listening to some communicative old women, might really, as far as society was concerned, as well have been travelling in the style of to-day.  Beyond the casual acquaintances I made when rain compelled me to indoor chat, I saw nobody who interested me until we reached Springfield.  There, at the top of the first short hill outside the town, after looking back on the white houses standing in the river-mist like so many ghosts in white muslin, I saw somebody whom my prophetic soul announced as a companion, looking wholly unlike a ghost, and very unlike a mist.  He raised his hand, just as we were about passing him, as if signalling an omnibus, and our driver suddenly reined in his team.

A full, hearty voice, not a bit nasal, but fresh from the broad chest, showed us a traveller by the road-side, waiting to be taken up.

He sprang with two bounds to the top of the coach, and made room for himself just above us among the countless boxes.

“Don’t let me disturb you, Madam All right.  Just room for my bag.  Go on, driver.”

“Fine day,” said we.

“A warm morning.  I have been walking for the last fifteen miles,—­but the sun is too hot for me.”

He took off his travelling-hat of weather-beaten Panama, and dried his broad brow with his handkerchief.  Then he looked at us with clear blue eyes, and tossed back his curling brown hair.  He had a gray travelling-dress, such as everybody wears now, but which was then a novelty; and something in his curt, clear accents, and his crimson lips, and the fresh life in his limbs and action, betrayed that he was not an American.  So much the better.