The courteous commodore of the yacht Fanny, whose kind invitation to a cruise I most gladly accepted, landed me on one of the islands, and another gentleman and I explored it, while the rest of the party took a swim. It seemed to be about six or eight acres, heavily covered with wood, and shaped like the top of a volcanic mountain, with a deep dell, or crater, in the centre. A prettier place for a fancy residence (with stables and farmhouse on the main land) could hardly be imagined. My friend had sailed his yacht up the Hudson to Peekskill, and thence, fifteen miles, she had been brought across upon wheels and launched for life upon the loftier waters of the Mahopac. He brings his family here every year, and spends his leisure charmingly, in cruising about among the islands, fishing and swimming. I noticed a considerable number of small row-boats, pulled about in all directions by young girls in sun-bonnets, and this fine exercise seems to be the amusement of the place, and one from which no danger whatever is apprehended. The boats were of a shape impossible to upset, and it struck me as a diversion for children most pleasant and reasonable.

You are sitting in your slippers, "minding the Doctor," only eighteen miles from this my present writing, dear Morris, and I have been to the stables to look up a conveyance by which to get where you are playing the invalid. The horses are "all out haying," however, and the easiest way, I find, to convey my sympathies to you bodily, is to return by railway to New York and steam it up the Hudson-a hundred miles round, easier than eighteen across. As this place becomes more frequented, there will, of course, be a plying of stages to Peekskill, and the route to the city will be a little varied.

I am very glad to see the end of my letter, for I write upon a

washstand in a triangular garret, and it will be a strong case of isolation, if the smell of hot shingles from without, and warm feathers within, have not given a tincture to my style. Goodbye to you across the mountains, my dear invalid, if your magnetism can feel my neighborhood thus far.

Yours, &c.

LETTER FROM ERIE RAILROAD.

A Thirty-Six Hours' Trip-Night's Sleep in the Cars-Waking up first at the End of Two Hundred Miles-Wonders of Locomotion-Country Tavern at Sunrise-Promiscuous Bed-room-Dressing in the EntryScenery in framed Panels-Drive between Susquehannah and Arched Viaduct-Entrance to the Storucco, and what it is like-Rainbow Bridge from Cloud to Cloud-Chasm of Rent-open Mountain-Cascade off DutyDrive to Great Bend-Much Seen in little Time, etc., etc.

As tired of town and toil as nerves and powers of attention could well be, dear Morris, I flung myself (as usual of late) into the refreshing arms of the Erie Railroad, the evening after getting our last paper to press. With the brief rocking and fanning of the twenty miles' boating to Piermont, I became quite ready for sleep in those two long iron arms (which, iron though they are, do the soothing of arms softer and shorter), and I do not think I was conscious of a thought till within twenty miles of the Susquehannah. The cars that leave Piermont at evening (to explain the soundness of my repose) are fitted with reclining couches, ingeniously arranged for sleep in two attitudes, and as most men, leave the city for this train pretty well tired, most

passengers sleep, from the Hudson to the Susquehannah, very soundly. The conductor, if you are not practised traveller enough to have anticipated him, politely suggests that you should pin your ticket on your sleeve, or slip it under the band of your hat, so that he need not wake you for a rummage into your pocket, when compelled, as usual after every stopping-place, to reconnoitre for new comers.

“Here we leave the Delaware," said a voice as the cars came to a stop, and, thus awoke from my first sleep, I stepped out to air my eyelids and get a breath unpulverized with cinders. It was dawn, and the falling garment of Night was holding on by one button-a single brilliant star in the east. All of earth that I could see was thickly wooded, producing the impression—(so deliciously refreshing after a surfeit of town)—of a new world in its virgin covering of leaves. So far from the city, and how had I got here so unconsciously! I looked at my conveyance to realize it-two hundred miles, in a long row of houses, and without breaking my nap! That this ponderous train of cars had borne me hither so softly and so swiftly! I shall not stop wondering at railway travelling, I think, till we are

"Borne, like Loretto's chapel, thro' the air."

My errand, on this excursion, was to see the chasm of the Storuccoa rocky pass one hundred and eighty feet deep, over which the railway passes on a bridge of a single arch-and the village of Lanesboro', two miles beyond, was, of course, my stopping-place. I had persuaded our accomplished friend, Miss and the Doctor, to accompany me; and the three of us were deposited on the stoop of a country tavern at the calamitous in-door hour of five in the morning. You image to yourself, at

OBITUARY BREAKFAST.

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once, of course, the reluctant manners of the unshaved barkeeper, and the atmosphere of the just-opened and unswept bar-room! Where the lady was shown to, I did not enquire; but the Doctor and I were ushered into a small bed-room where the oxygen had been for some hours entirely exhausted, and where, on one of the two beds, lay asleep one of our promiscuous gender. "Don't mind him," said the barkeeper, as we backed out from the intrusion, "it's only a friend of mine !"—but even with this expressive encouragement, and a glance at the sleeper's boots, which gave us a conventional confirmation that he was a man not to be "minded," we persisted in leaving the sleeper to his privacy. Our accommodator then offered to "bring us the fixin's" for a toilet in the entry, which we at once accepted, dressing with a murderous look-out upon the slaughter of the chickens for our breakfast. I daguerreotype these details, and similar ones, of things and manners as they are, foreseeing that railroads will soon irrigate the country with refinements, in contrast with which these primitive sketches may be curious.

After a sort of obituary breakfast, on the chickens we had seen slain and the "deeds they had left behind them" in the shape of an orphan egg or two, we started in a rough wagon for the cascade. The way thither lay between a glory of Art and a glory of Nature, for, on our left, lay the Susquehannah in one of its finest passages of beauty, and, on our right, the magnificent viaduct, high in the air, by which the railroad descends to the valley level. Sky and mountains, seen under a range of lofty arches, are like a series of stupendous panels of landscape on the wall of a gigantic cathedral-and those who have not stood on the Campagna of Rome, at the base of the great Aqueducts, and looked off towards Albano, with the mountains divided and framed