——­It is an autumn morning, with such crimson glories to kindle it as lie along the twin ranges of mountain that guard the Hudson.  The white frosts shine like changing silk in the fields of late-growing clover; the river-mists curl, and idle along the bosom of the water, and creep up the hill-sides, and at noon float their feathery vapors aloft in clouds; the crimson trees blaze in the side valleys, and blend their vermilion tints under the fairy hands of our American frost-painters with the dark blood of the ash-trees and the orange-tinted oaks.  Blue and bright under the clear Fall heaven, the broad river shines before the surging prow of the boat like a shield of steel.

The bracing air lights up rich dreams of life.  Your fancy peoples the valleys and the hill-tops with its creations; and your hope lends some crowning beauty of the landscape to your dreamy future.  The vision of your last college year is not gone.  That figure, whose elegance your eyes then feasted on, still floats before you; and the memory of the last talk with Laura is as vivid as if it were only yesterday that you listened.  Indeed this opening campaign of travel—­although you are half ashamed to confess it to yourself—­is guided by the thought of her.

Dalton with a party of friends, his sister among them, is journeying to the north.  A hope of meeting them—­scarce acknowledged as an intention—­spurs you on.  The eye rests dreamily and vaguely on the beauties that appear at every turn:  they are beauties that charm you, and charm you the more by an indefinable association with that fairy object that floats before you, half unknown, and wholly unclaimed.  The quiet towns with their noonday stillness, the out-lying mansions with their stately splendor, the bustling cities with their mocking din, and the long reaches of silent and wooded shore, chime with their several beauties to your heart, in keeping with the master-key that was touched long weeks before.

The cool, honest advices of the father drift across your memory in shadowy forms, as you wander through the streets of the first northern cities; and all the need for observation, and the incentives to purpose, which your ambitious designs would once have quickened, fade dismally when you find that she is not there.  All the lax gayety of Saratoga palls on the appetite; even the magnificent shores of Lake George, though stirring your spirit to an insensible wonder and love, do not cheat you into a trance that lingers.  In vain the sun blazons every isle, and lights every shaded cove, and at evening stretches the Black Mountain in giant slumber on the waters.

Your thought bounds away from the beauty of sky and lake, and fastens upon the ideal which your dreamy humors cherish.  The very glow of pursuit heightens your fervor,—­a fervor that dims sadly the new-wakened memories of home.  The southern gates of Champlain, those fir-draped Trosachs of America, are passed, and you find yourself, upon a golden evening of Canadian autumn, in the quaint old city of Montreal.