very nearly where the Nelson House now stands, and at the Poughkeepsie Hotel.  It was one of Poughkeepsie’s great days when he came.  Daniel Webster has spoken in her court house; and Henry Clay, in 1844, when a presidential candidate, stopped for a reception.  And it is said that, by a mere accident, she just missed contributing a name to the list of presidents of the United States.  The omitted candidate was Nathaniel P. Talmadge.  He could have had the vice-presidential candidacy, the story goes, in 1840, but would not take it.  If he had accepted it, he would have gone into history not merely as United States senator from New York and afterwards Governor of Wisconsin territory, but as president in John Tyler’s place.

“In 1844, the New York State Fair was held here somewhere east of what is now Hooker Avenue.  It was an occasion thought important enough then to be pictured and reported in the London Illustrated News.  Two years after the telegraph wires were put up in this city, before they had yet reached the city of New York.  Considering the fact that Prof.  S. F. B. Morse, the telegraph inventor, had his residence here, this incident was not wholly inappropriate.

“The advent in 1849 of the Hudson River Railroad, which was an enterprise in its day of startling courage and magnitude, constituted a special epoch in the history of Poughkeepsie and the Hudson River towns.  Men of middle age here well remember the hostility and ridicule the project occasioned when it was first broached.  Some said no railroad ever could be built on the river’s edge; and, if you should build one, the enormous expense incurred would make it forever unprofitable.  It seemed then the height of Quixotism to lay an expensive track where the river offered a free way to all.  Property holders, whose property was to be greatly benefited, fought the railroad company with unusual spirit and persistence.  But the railroad came, nevertheless, and needs no advocate or apologist to-day.  There is no one now living here who would ask its removal, any more than he would ask the removal of the Hudson River itself.”

* * *

  And lo! the Catskills print the distant sky,
    And o’er their airy tops the faint clouds driven,
  So softly blending, that the cheated eye
    Forgets or which is earth or which is heaven.

  Theodore S. Fay.

* * *

  Mountains on mountains in the distance rise,
  Like clouds along the far horizon’s verge;
  Their misty summits mingling with the skies,
  Till earth and heaven seem blended into one.

  Bayard Taylor.

* * *

Poughkeepsie has been known for more than half a century as the City of Schools.  The Parthenon-like structure which crowns College Hill was prophetic of a still grander and more widely known institution, the first in the world devoted to higher culture for women,—­