* * *

  Welcome ye pleasant dales and hills,
    Where dream-like passed my early days! 
  Ye cliffs and glens and laughing rills
    That sing unconscious hymns of praise!

  Wallace Bruce.

* * *

=Lindenwald=, a solid and substantial residence, home of President Martin Van Buren, where he died in 1862, is two miles from the pleasant village of Kinderhook.  Columbia County just missed the proud distinction of rearing two presidents, as Samuel J. Tilden was born in the town of Lebanon.  Elisha Williams, John Van Buren and many others have given lustre to her legal annals.

* * *

  Ever fonder, ever dearer
    Seems our youth that hastened by,
  And we love to live in memory
    When our fond hopes fade and die.

  Wallace Bruce.

* * *

=Hudson to Albany.=

=Athens.=—­Directly opposite Hudson, and connected with it by ferry, is the classically named village of Athens.  An old Mahican settlement known as Potick was located a little back from the river.  We are now in the midst of the great

="Ice Industry,"= which reaches from below Staatsburgh to Castleton and Albany, well described by John Burroughs in his article on the Hudson:  “No man sows, yet many men reap a harvest from the Hudson.  Not the least important is the ice harvest, which is eagerly looked for, and counted upon by hundreds, yes, thousands of laboring men along its course.  Ice or no ice sometimes means bread or no bread to scores of families, and it means added or diminished comforts to many more.  It is a crop that takes two or three weeks of rugged winter weather to grow, and, if the water is very roily or brackish, even longer.  It is seldom worked till it presents seven or eight inches of clear water ice.  Men go out from time to time and examine it, as the farmer goes out and examines his grain or grass, to see when it will do to cut.  If there comes a deep fall of snow the ice is ‘pricked’ so as to let the water up through and form snow ice.  A band of fifteen or twenty men, about a yard apart, each armed with a chisel-bar, and marching in line, puncture the ice at each step, with a single sharp thrust.  To and fro they go, leaving a belt behind them that presently becomes saturated with water.  But ice, to be of first quality, must grow from beneath, not from above.  It is a crop quite as uncertain as any other.  A good yield every two or three years, as they say of wheat out west, is about all that can be counted upon.  When there is an abundant harvest, after the ice houses are filled, they stack great quantities of it, as the farmer stacks his surplus hay.  Such a fruitful winter was that of ’74-5, when the ice formed twenty inches thick.  The stacks are given only a temporary covering of boards, and are the first ice removed in the season.  The cutting and gathering of the ice enlivens these broad, white, desolate fields amazingly.  My house happens