ts of light, open the golden
door of your palace domed in a lily, glide over these inky waves, O my
queen of all waters, come to me wherever you are, with your pencil
dipped in darkness, starry with diamond dews and spanned with the
softness of rainbows, and set on this land-locked Neptune your cross of
the Legion of Honor, assure to the angry god his bowl in Valhalla, that
the thunder-vexed lake may be soothed with its immortality!

But the storm passes on, the clouds sweep magnificently away, and the
glowing sky flings up its arch of promise. The lucent waters catch its
gleam and spread in their depths a second arch as beautiful and bright.
So, haloed with magnificence, an earth-born bark on fairy waters,
completely circled by this glory of the skies and seas, we pass through
our triumphal gateway "deep into the dying day," and are presently
doused in the mud at Rouse's Point. Rouse's Point is undoubtedly a
very good place, and they were good women there, and took good care of
us; but Rouse's Point is a dreadful place to wake up in when you have
been in Dream-Land,--especially when a circus is there, singing and
shouting under your windows all night long. I wonder when circus-people
sleep, or do they not sleep at all, but keep up a perpetual ground and
lofty tumbling? From Rouse's Point through Northern New York, through
endless woods and leagues of brilliant fire-weed, the spirit of the
dead flames that raved through the woods, past corn-fields that looked
rather "skimpy," certainly not to be compared to a corn-field I wot of,
whose owner has a mono-mania on the subject of corn and potatoes, and
fertilizes his fields with his own blood and brain,--a snort, a rush, a
shriek, and the hundred miles is accomplished, and we are at
Ogdensburg, a smart little town, like all American towns, with handsome
residences up, and handsomer ones going up, with haberdashers' shops,
and lawyers' offices, and judges' robes, and most hospitable
citizens,--one at least,--and all the implements and machinery of
government and self-direction, not excepting a huge tent for political
speaking and many political speeches, and everybody alert,
public-spirited, and keyed up to the highest pitch. All this is
interesting, but we have seen it ever since we were born, and we look
away with wistful eyes to the north; for this broad, majestic river
stretching sky-ward like the ocean, is the Lawrence. Up this river, on
the day of St. Lawrence, t