picturesqueness, and it is in honor of our friends that I say they enjoyed it.  There are nowhere any considerable hills, but everywhere generous slopes and pleasant hollows and the wide meadows of a grazing country, with the pretty brown Mohawk River rippling down through all, and at frequent intervals the life of the canal, now near, now far away, with the lazy boats that seem not to stir, and the horses that the train passes with a whirl, and, leaves slowly stepping forward and swiftly slipping backward.  There are farms that had once, or still have, the romance to them of being Dutch farms,—­if there is any romance in that,—­and one conjectures a Dutch thrift in their waving grass and grain.  Spaces of woodland here and there dapple the slopes, and the cozy red farm-houses repose by the side of their capacious red barns.  Truly, there is no ground on which to defend the idleness, and yet as the train strives furiously onward amid these scenes of fertility and abundance, I like in fancy to loiter behind it, and to saunter at will up and down the landscape.  I stop at the farm-yard gates, and sit upon the porches or thresholds, and am served with cups of buttermilk by old Dutch ladies who have done their morning’s work and have leisure to be knitting or sewing; or if there are no old ladies, with decent caps upon their gray hair, then I do not complain if the drink is brought me by some red-cheeked, comely young girl, out of Washington Irving’s pages, with no cap on her golden braids, who mirrors my diffidence, and takes an attitude of pretty awkwardness while she waits till I have done drinking.  In the same easily contented spirit as I lounge through the barn-yard, if I find the old hens gone about their family affairs, I do not mind a meadow-lark’s singing in the top of the elm-tree beside the pump.  In these excursions the watch-dogs know me for a harmless person, and will not open their eyes as they lie coiled up in the sun before the gate.  At all the places, I have the people keep bees, and, in the garden full of worthy pot-herbs, such idlers in the vegetable world as hollyhocks and larkspurs and four-o’clocks, near a great bed in which the asparagus has gone to sleep for the season with a dream of delicate spray hanging over it.  I walk unmolested through the farmer’s tall grass, and ride with him upon the perilous seat of his voluble mowing-machine, and learn to my heart’s content that his name begins with Van, and that his family has owned that farm ever since the days of the Patroon; which I dare say is not true.  Then I fall asleep in a corner of the hayfield, and wake up on the tow-path of the canal beside that wonderfully lean horse, whose bones you cannot count only, because they are so many.  He never wakes up, but, with a faltering under-lip and half-shut eyes, hobbles stiffly on, unconscious of his anatomical interest.  The captain hospitably asks me on board, with a twist of the rudder swinging the stern of the boat up to the path, so that I can