st of a busy bird in a luxuriant meadow. There is the
sound of pleasant waters, the roar of a mighty cataract, the din of two
score busy mills, the music of the spindles, the cogs and the reels, the
clash and the clangor of the factories, the thunderings of the forges,
and the footfalls of a hundred thousand happy, contented people who have
wrung competence and even luxury from the hard hand of necessity and
toil.

From the summit of Mount Hope Observatory, an elevation of nearly five
hundred feet above the lake, there is a grand picture whereon the eye
may rest. At your feet, and to the north, lies the busy city with the
noble Genesee winding rapidly through it, lending its half-million
horse-power force to the needs of labor, then plunging a hundred feet
downwards, eddying and rushing onward, plunging and eddying again and
again, until it sobers into a steady current northward towards Ontario
through a deep, dark gorge, looking like an ugly serpent trailing to the
lower inland sea where can be seen the city of Charlotte, formerly
called Port Genesee, the port of Rochester, beyond which, on a clear
day, may be seen countless dreamy sails, and steamers with their
trailing plumes of smoke, and still beyond appears the dim outlines of
the far-off Canadian shore. To the east, as far as can be discerned,
lies a country of the nature of "openings"--beautiful groves of trees,
magnificent farms, with the almost palatial homes of the owners, who
have become rich from the legacies of their ancestors with the added
thrift of scores of fruitful years. Southward for a half hundred miles,
stretches the beautiful valley of the Genesee, dimpled by lesser valleys
and a hundred sparkling brooks, and dotted by field and forest and
numberless groups of half-hidden houses, with outbuildings full to
bursting with the fruitage of the fields; while to the west along the
lake are low ranges of sand-hills, and south of these extending nearly
to Lake Erie is a beautiful prairie country, while with a glass can be
traced the ghostly mist perpetually hovering above Niagara.

If this scene be inspiring to the looker-on, the intrinsic beauty of the
city, its unusual life, its fine public buildings, business houses, and
splendid private residences; its clean macadamized streets and broad,
brick walks, shaded with the trees of half a century's growth as in many
of the famous Southern cities; its numberless little parks or "places,"
owned in common by