to the call of the future—­it is a pity that we shall never see her again, and that she has nothing whatever to do with our journey.  She also will have her romance; fate will meet her in the way some day, and set her pure heart wildly beating, and she will know what those purple distances mean.  Happiness, tragedy, anguish—­who can tell what is in store for her?  I cannot but feel profound sadness at meeting her in this casual way and never seeing her again.  Who says that the world is not full of romance and pathos and regret as we go our daily way in it?  You meet her at a railway station; there is the flutter of a veil, the gleam of a scarlet bird, the lifting of a pair of eyes—­she is gone; she is entering a drawing-room, and stops a moment and turns away; she is looking from a window as you pass—­it is only a glance out of eternity; she stands for a second upon a rock looking seaward; she passes you at the church door—­is that all?  It is discovered that instantaneous photographs can be taken.  They are taken all the time; some of them are never developed, but I suppose these impressions are all there on the sensitive plate, and that the plate is permanently affected by the impressions.  The pity of it is that the world is so full of these undeveloped knowledges of people worth knowing and friendships worth making.

The comfort of leaving same things to the imagination was impressed upon our travelers when they left the narrow-gauge railway at the mountain station, and identified themselves with other tourists by entering a two-horse wagon to be dragged wearily up the hill through the woods.  The ascent would be more tolerable if any vistas were cut in the forest to give views by the way; as it was, the monotony of the pull upward was only relieved by the society of the passengers.  There were two bright little girls off for a holiday with their Western uncle, a big, good-natured man with a diamond breast-pin, and his voluble son, a lad about the age of his little cousins, whom he constantly pestered by his rude and dominating behavior.  The boy was a product which it is the despair of all Europe to produce, and our travelers had great delight in him as an epitome of American “smartness.”  He led all the conversation, had confident opinions about everything, easily put down his deferential papa, and pleased the other passengers by his self-sufficient, know-it-all air.  To a boy who had traveled in California and seen the Alps it was not to be expected that this humble mountain could afford much entertainment, and he did not attempt to conceal his contempt for it.  When the stage reached the Rip Van Winkle House, half-way, the shy schoolgirls were for indulging a little sentiment over the old legend, but the boy, who concealed his ignorance of the Irving romance until his cousins had prattled the outlines of it, was not to be taken in by any such chaff, and though he was a little staggered by Rip’s own cottage, and by the sight of the cave above it which is labeled