know not; but as she was
stumbling along, thus overloaded, a lady, just entering the car with
some others, with a sudden, generous impulse, took the baby in her arms,
and, at the risk of losing her own passage, carried it to the door of
the waiting-room. Then, without stopping to receive the thanks of the
grateful mother, she rejoined her friends, smiling at her own exploit,
and all unconscious of the admiration her beautiful action had excited
in some of her fellow travellers. At the picturesque village of Bellow's
Falls, on the Connecticut river, we entered the 'Old Granite State,' but
too far south to see the 'native mountains' in their wildest grandeur
and magnificence. One specimen, however, greets us as we leave the
village--a huge, perpendicular mass of granite, rising sheer up from the
railroad to the height of a thousand feet or more; while the river, a
wild receptacle of tumbled rocks and broken falls, stretches along the
other side of the track, far beneath us. The labor expended in the
construction of this mountain road (the Cheshire Railroad) must have
been enormous, and affords a striking proof of the indomitable energy
and enterprise of the New England character. The high places have
literally been brought low, and the valleys exalted. Not once, but many
times, the train rushes through between two perpendicular walls of solid
granite, so high that not a glimpse of the sky can be seen from the car
windows; while beyond, some hollow chasm or rugged gulley has been
bridged over, or filled up with the superabundant masses of stone
excavated from the deep cuts.

It gives one a feeling of dizzy exaltation to be whirled, at the rate of
thirty or forty miles an hour--for as there is for a good part of the
way a descending grade, the velocity is tremendous--along the verge of a
mountain, and to see other mountains, with valleys, rivers, villages,
and church steeples, spread out beneath you, as if on a map. But
gradually the face of the country changes; the mountains become less
lofty, the granite formations disappear; here stretches a wide, dismal
pond of stagnant water, yellow with water lilies (_Nuphar_), and there a
field that has been burnt over, leaving the scorched and branchless
trees standing like a host of hideous spectres, until at last the
fertile and highly cultivated fields of Massachusetts smile upon us with
a pleasant, cheerful aspect.

But, pleasing as it is to contemplate well-cultivated farms a